EL SUEÑO DE GRANADA ART WORLD
The ship of the Argonauts is an essential minimalist album, in which Poetry and music are harmoniously and delicately integrated into a fundamental piece of our musical history. New age in Spanish
I would like to feel that sensation again when I was listening to this music over and over again... that sensation of discovering something new, violins breaking into chords, harmonies that repeat insistently in a rebellious display of insubordination and rebeld Art. Just like a child when discovers the sea. I see the waves, I see the sand, foam skirting the shore, Again harmony ... again, sounds of the sea ...
The writer Apollonius of Rhodes wrote this compilation of traditional mystical legends, the third epic poem after Homer's The Iliad and Odyssey, in the middle of the 3rd century BC.
"Argo was launched by the heroes, in the middle of a large crowd on the beach of Págasas, where they disembarked after offering a sacrifice to Apollo. The omens were favorable: interpreted by Idmón, they declared that all of them would return safe except Idmón himself... "
THE NAU OF ARGONAUTS is a record of minimal, ambient or new age music of the eighties. It owes much of its attraction to phonetic-musical games, the voices of the late Montse Anfruns and Salvador Jàfer, author of the five poems on which the album is based, contained in the book Navegant Obscur (Gregal, 1987).
At the Poiemusia days in 1986, Pep Llopis was asked to compose music for the poems of Jàfer, a respected writer of a generation of poets who claimed from the seventies the recovery of the Valencian.
“I think that what has impacted the most with the passage of time has been the way of launching the verses. They were not songs, but recited some kind between the poetry and the rhythm of the music". The result is a very emotional electro-acoustic work, with minimalist influences of Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass.
The Poiemusia festival, in which Carles Santos and Wim Mertens also performed, was the only time that La Nau dels Argonauts was performed live with all the instruments for which it was composed. Llopis remembers that night as an anthological success. “The theater was crowded and many former colleagues came to congratulate us in the dressing room. But, as usual, it was an ephemeral success. ”
The following year the album was recorded at the Tabalet studios. In the credits, Montse Anfruns and Salvador Jàfer on vocals; Perico Sambeat on the flute; Josep Ángel Murillo on clarinet and Aleixandre Abad on cello, while percussion, vibraphone and marimba, Joan Cerveró, founder of the Grup Instrumental de València and director of the Ensems festival of contemporary music until 2014.
"For two years I have not known what happens to everyone, that they do nothing more but call me Record labels interested in reissuing it.
"When The ship of Argonauts was published, in general people were hooked on music, but not on the intervention of voices. Everyone asked me to reissue it without the texts. And now, however, the opposite is happening. "It took thirty years for people to understand that album. Unfortunately, Montse left us in 2014, that's why I dedicated this reissue to him. He was a person with whom I had a very special relationship."
“In those days I was aware that I had composed something great. A very inspired album as I recall, with a very lively creation process, explains the composer, surprised to know that copies of the album are selling for more than one hundred euros, and that some people have tried to sell them for 400.
"This album is designed to be enjoyed as a seascape." “In the recording, the voices converge gently to evaporate later.
Culturplaza interview
