Santiago Diez Fischer
SONGS
Gyre Ensemble

1   and your mouth is like the sound of many waters   (2024)    9:32

2   tres ciegos    (2015)    13:36

3   under the redwood tree    (2023)     12:31

4   rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort    (2024)    8:19

5   sappho's song    (2024)      12:25

 

Gyre

Alejandro Oliván López, baritone saxophone

Stefanie Mirwald-Keiser, accordion

Christian Streit Smith, percussion

 

Interview with Santiago Diez Fischer

Before we talk about your album ‘Songs’, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in music – like where are you from? And how and when did you come to contemporary music?

I was born in Argentina, in a small town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I’ve always had a strong connection with culture, poetry, and music, thanks to my parents. I started playing the guitar when I was fourteen, although I actually wanted to play the cello. At that time, buying a cello was too expensive, but my grandmother had a guitar at home, so that’s how I began. Later, my father bought me an electric guitar, and that’s when I truly immersed myself in music.

When I had to decide on a career path, I hesitated between literature and composition. I eventually chose composition because there was something in sound that felt both magical and poetic to me.  Formal studies often tend to strip that “magic” away, so my first years were difficult, but once I began writing music, everything changed — shaping sound was exactly what I had been looking for.

In Argentina I studied with Jorge Sad, who not only taught me to enjoy sound but also gave me the opportunity to work in a university studio.

At the beginning of the 2000s in Argentina, it was very difficult to find an ensemble capable of properly performing student compositions. It wasn’t a problem of the musicians themselves or their skills, but simply that no ensemble would rehearse more than once before a concert. For us, as students, each concert was a major disappointment because the result was always halfway there, which prevented us from doing real critical work on our music. We couldn’t truly hear whether what we had imagined and written actually worked — whether what we heard corresponded to our idea.

Because of this problem, I devoted myself mainly to electroacoustic composition for several years, thanks to Jorge Sad’s proposal to work in the university studio. I was fascinated by the possibility of working directly with sound material and obtaining an immediate musical result. Still, my studio time was limited — I could only use the university facilities (computer, software, speakers, etc.) twice a week, for three hours each day. My solution was to use my voice to reproduce ideas, gestures, and sonic behaviors, to record them, and then to try to write and draw those recordings in a sort of personal graphic score.

A few years later, when I returned to instrumental composition, I felt the need to find an alternative voice to deepen that method. That’s when I came across the idea of plastic sonority: the sound produced by a plastic object rubbed with a bow, usually a double bass bow. This second voice enriched my own, and between the two I discovered a new kind of vocality in my work.

This method, which was initially a response to a practical limitation, gradually became a poetic act. The human voice and the plastic voice are, for me today, the instruments through which I experiment in order to write a poetic sound.

Of course, studying with people like Rebecca Saunders, Philippe Leroux, Denis Dufour, Christine Groult, and having courses or encounters with Chaya Czernowin and Pierluigi Billone, profoundly changed my understanding of music, my own music, and the magical relationship that exists in interpretation.

Another fundamental aspect has been being an immigrant in Europe — living here and not in my country inevitably changes and enriches you.

Finally, in 2020, the opportunity arose to create a mixed music class linked to the electroacoustic composition department at the Conservatoire de Pantin. The electroacoustic class there is perhaps the most important one in French acousmatic music — a class with decades of history, where many composers who are now central to contemporary music have studied.

I was given the chance to innovate, to propose a class focused on experimentation, new lutheries, and experimental mixed composition. Together with my colleagues Marco Marini and Jonathan Prager, and the students, we’ve built a wonderful community of creators.

 

Great, now onto the album ‘SONGS’:  it contains five works, all written for the musicians of Gyre Ensemble, but spread over a period of nearly 10 years.  Were the pieces conceived as a set (or a suite) from the start – or do they stand on their own as separate works?

All the pieces grew out of the first one that Gyre played — Tres Ciegos. Originally, that work was written for two percussionists and accordion, but at the trio’s request I reworked it for saxophone, percussion, and accordion. That was our first collaboration.

Later, the idea for the album came up — the concept was to write one piece for each musician, plus a new trio. While there are differences between the first trio and the later pieces, I think there’s a thread connecting them all. The voice is perhaps that thread. In all five works, the musicians’ voices are involved in one way or another.

The other four works are more closely connected musically. They share a common sonority that flows through them, and the voice — the singing — always reappears.

I think listening to the album in the order it was conceived helps enrich the experience, but each piece also has its own universe and can stand independently.

 

Three of the SONGS use electronics, and the other two sound as if they do. And – as you say - all the pieces have a vocal element, though no singer as such. The titles of the pieces also all reference works by female writers.  So a lot is going on – can you explain it to us?

Yes, there’s a lot happening at once — I guess it’s a bit like life, isn’t it?

The electronics are usually quite simple. I want to play with the musicians; I want to be part of the performance experience. So the electronic part is me playing some object or instrument. In most of the pieces I’m playing guitar, plastic objects, or other materials. The fact that I perform different instruments to build the electronics gives the music a kind of organic quality — it makes the relationship with the acoustic instruments more like a chamber music experience.

At the same time, electronics are something the piece either asks for or doesn’t. It’s never an obligation. The trio Sappho’s Song has no electronics (though it sometimes sounds like it does) — the conception of the piece didn’t call for it. For me, electronics are just another instrument, one that adds something when needed, but only if the musical idea demands it.

The voice, in this case, represents almost a deus ex machina — something that shifts the listener’s perception. The voice is undoubtedly the transformative element in my work.  But the voice isn’t present only as sound; it also appears in the poetry of these women writers. Since childhood I’ve had a special connection with reading and poetry. A family friend, the Argentine poet Olga Orozco, embodied that feminine poetic voice, and she was someone who changed my life. That led me to seek that voice in other poets — a voice that nourishes me with images I often use as titles in my works.

In short, electronics are my way of giving my voice to the dialogue with the instruments; the use of the human voice in the pieces opens the door to a deeply spiritual sound world; and the titles drawn from the works of female poets represent the voice that has inspired me since my childhood.

 

I’m not often a fan of voice in contemporary music, but I really like the way you use voices in SONGS. It’s clearly not traditional classical singing, but has a kind of everyday, unpolished quality which I much prefer.  Can you say a bit more about how and why you are using voices here?

Clearly, the voice I have in mind is not a classical or trained voice — it’s an everyday voice, the voice with which we hum a song we love, with which we imitate an instrument. It’s the voice with which, I imagine, our ancestors once sang. A primordial voice.

At the same time, the melodies I use in my works are ones I sing after finishing the piece — I improvise them over the mock-up of the work, once it’s already complete. In a way, my voice “emerges” — poetically, at least — from the very entrails of the piece.

There’s something I often discuss with my students: the concept of non finito. This idea of an aesthetic of the unfinished (or the seemingly unfinished) feels very rich to me in art. When we talk about what is “unfinished”, we think of the works that Michelangelo never completed. In those pieces, the material — the stone, the raw matter of nature — becomes intertwined with the spiritual quest of the human being, of the artist. That place where stone ceases to be stone and becomes sculpture, and where the sculpture merges again with the raw stone, is beautiful.

Sometimes I think that my voice — or the voice within my music — carries that same spirit: an unfinished element that at once gives the stone to the sculpture and the form to the material.

 

How did you meet the musicians from Gyre, and how fundamental were they to shaping the music?

I first met Christian, as he had performed in several works by composers I know and admire, and later I met Stefi and Alejandro. With all of them there was a special chemistry.

Composition often involves a lot of solitary work, but — at least for my music — close collaboration with musicians is essential. Working with the three of them during the composition process, the recording, and the editing was absolutely fundamental. The album wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t worked together.

 

The music is more abrasive than a lot of what we release on Another Timbre, so I was intrigued when you and Christian expressed interest in releasing it on the label.

I think the album is a perfect fit for Another Timbre. I’ve known the label for a long time and listened to many of its releases. I feel that SONGS combines elements that make it ideal for them. Not long ago, a friend described my music as “punk-lyrical” or “punk-poetic”, and I think that’s quite accurate — it’s the poetic voice that emerges from chaos. That definition fits perfectly with Another Timbre’s spirit.

 

Going back to the start of this interview, it strikes me that there have been a few other Argentine musicians who have appeared on Another Timbre – Lucio Capece, Gabriel Paiuk, and Tomàs Cabado – but I think that all of you now live in Europe. This is completely understandable as Europe must offer many more possibilities for contemporary composers & musicians, but it’s also a bit sad that you have had to leave your native country to prosper.  I know that the situation in Argentina is particularly chaotic at the moment, but do you ever think of going back and living and working there?

It’s a subject that, as an Argentine and an immigrant, one reflects on a lot.

First of all, I know Lucio’s, Gabriel’s, and Tomás’s music very well — it’s music I admire deeply, and I’m happy to share the same label with them.

I think that, for me, Argentina represents my childhood — my parents and siblings, my family home. It’s something that marked me deeply. Argentine rock, tango, folk music — the sound of Argentina shaped me.

But I remember a literature teacher who once told us that the Ithaca Odysseus longed to return to wasn’t a place in space, but a place in time. Argentina is my country, the one I miss and love, but I know that if I were to return today, it wouldn’t be the Argentina I left — because that Argentina exists in my personal history.

At the same time, I think Argentina is a country built by immigrants — Spanish, Italian, English, and German immigrants who were always on the verge of returning home. And I think — from my own experience — that this idea of returning is always present in us, because as the tango says,  yo siempre estoy volviendo (I’m always coming back).