With more than seventy albums under his belt, the prolific composer and performer Wim Mertens (Neerpelt, Belgium, 1953) is once again in the news with the publication of Ranges of Robustness. It goes on sale on June 7 and is presented two weeks later, on the 23rd, at Umusic Hotel Teatro Albéniz in Madrid, within the framework of the Universal Music Festival and surrounded by a large band. There are 44 years of recording career at the rate of almost two jobs per year, which have led him to collaborate in cinema (his is the music for The Architect’s Belly by Peter Greenaway) and theater. And now to investigate different ranges of robustness…
Does it perhaps explore the solidity of the human species after covid?
No, it has nothing to do with the pandemic. It’s because I love the musicality of this word. In English it sounds mainstream and also in Dutch, but it makes me happy that they have the robustness in Spain. We can do the interview only on this topic, the R of robustness. And also ranges sound great.
Really?
I am in love with the sound of words, and especially Spanish ones. I suggest you not translate the title of the album, it sounds much better Robot Ranges. The important thing is the R’s. I also have an R in my name. The R is shift lever. Because in German, Dutch and Flemish we say something that is not a cliché: the word is equivalent to the theme. It doesn’t happen with French, which is the language of fantasy, but maybe it does in Spanish. When you are in a mental situation or even in composition, you always need the ability to turn around, with the R, and that leads you to solutions. It is important. I see that her name, Maricel, also has that R; Well, I don’t like people who don’t have it, they are too predictable and stable, they can’t change. You have the capacity for change through the R, which is that transition to make a correction.
Very interesting.
In addition, it contains in the name the sea and the sky, two elements with information about musical instruments: wind instruments work due to air pressure, and gliding above the water is what string instruments do. In other words, it already has 50% of the instrumental information in its name.
Don’t tell me, ha ha.
He has a huge advantage, huh. It’s not fair, it has taken me forty years to develop this idea of ??the instruments in the four elements. And I presented them in my last album with images of the great war in Belgium: water, earth, air (the soldier holding a gun) and fire (the explosion). The harp, which is a heavy instrument, is rooted, tied to the earth. Fire is the meter of percussion and piano. When I have a small idea for a composition it always comes with the fifth element, which is the voice. You can have a beautiful idea but to translate it into music you need that Mertens R or Ranges of ‘robustness’, the transition of this idea in the score.
Are you driven by emotion, idea or concept when composing?
I hate everything in life or music that is conceptual, because a concept is outside of reality. It puts too much emphasis on the rational aspect, it is not a sufficient creative element. And American minimalist music for me is too conceptual. You can have a beautiful concept, but as a composer you bend to it. And I stopped doing that in 1980. It has to do with your character, with where you were born, with many factors that you cannot control. I was not born in a city of millions of inhabitants, for that you do need a concept. I prefer not to compose or make mistakes than to compose conceptually. And it doesn’t mean he’s never done it. At first I did, and I was so disappointed that I made a mistake in the title, I put an i in Inergys instead of an e. That piece, from my third album, was composed by chance sitting next to Laurie Anderson flying from New York to San Francisco. And I also made a mistake when counting, so that was my experience in conceptual music.
And what about emotions?
I’m careful with emotions in my music, because my mother was not a very emotional person. 20 years ago I published the album Skopos, which in Greek is the line that a melodic phrase follows to hit the target. Emotion cannot be that target, because it is an effect of that melody. The composer must be able to produce these melodic lines, but they are received in a particular place and time, in a first experience, from which they remain in memory and grow. Hence, people can come and tell me that my music is part of their life. That is a beautiful experience as a musician.
Do you think that your audience is renewed or is it the one that was captivated in the 80s and 90s?
My only ambition is to be an idea in the time to which I belong, an inspiration in that era of pop in which we live. The idea is linked to opportunity, risk and play. We take risks to get some pleasure, to avoid conflict. That is the ambition of my music: it is not predictable, it is not a concept.
Is it difficult to maintain that creative freedom living in Europe today?
I accept one hundred percent that I am European and I want to express myself in the European tradition. The music has to be universal but it has to come from a local inspiration, linked to a certain place, which can be Flanders, Belgium or northern Europe or the heart of Europe. We have to use the meanings that have been given to us by being born in a certain place. My father was an amateur musician, he played a dozen instruments and I am very interested in the orchestral sound, with the different colors. This is something that is in your system and you have to do something with it. I force myself to do it, as a musician and performer. You can start from a robust idea but there will always be nuances, there will always be the possibility of an exception. My music is an exception. Something was given to me and I had to do something with it.
He studied music but was not trained at an academic level.
No. I had to work with my limitations but also with the advantages of not having been pushed to create in a certain way. I knew I had to forget many things about the European avant-garde. Hence the title of that first album, Vergessen (forget in German).
He composed as a child…
I was already composing when I was 12 years old, in the sixties. At home there was very little verbal communication. But it was intense in the intonation and the way everyone sang all the time. Not my mother, she was totally unmusical. She did some funny dance steps. Every year we went to Brussels and Ostend, where we had family. My father would take the dozen of his instruments and I would take the guitar and… he would always sing. But I couldn’t memorize the lyrics, so in 1984 I decided that I would develop my own language: I improvise, hence my way of singing. And for the chorus I only write phonetic notations.
This June marks 40 years since the premiere of the play The power of theatrical, by Jan Fabre, for which you composed your famous Maximizing the Audience. It was the first piece that used the voice. Was it because it was theater?
Yes, because it was theater. I was so shy that to sing in the studio I asked for the lights to be turned off, so that no one could see me. But Jan Fabre gave me texts and that’s where things started. I was so surprised by that voice… In Spain Maximizing was an explosion, because two months after the record company Accidental Recordings released the album we already had a disco version. And I had to go to Madrid and perform in a nightclub. I had never gone to any. So I played there among those crazy, strange people. I had only been to Spain twice, we crossed it by car with a friend to go to Lisbon.
What language do you dream in?
The question would be if I really dream. No, they are erotic dreams but non-verbal.
But his mother tongue is flamenco.
Yes, and then there is French, German, English, and I understand Spanish and Italian. Here we have four languages, four governments: German, French, Flemish, in addition to the national government. If you think that living in Barcelona is complicated, I invite you to come. I love languages. I have presented many projects alphabetically. All 26 letters of the alphabet are in my album titles, except for one. I was frustrated that it wasn’t in the thousand compositions I’ve made in 44 years.
Which?
I wanted to occupy the European alphabet with the titles of my albums. On my website you can see my albums in chronological order or alphabetically. And the x is missing. Xanthe’s x…she That’s it, she already knows too much.
