SD Cards & Water Tower Reverbs

a conversation with Farida Amadou

Farida Amadou, photo by Laurent Orseau.

Farida Amadou is a musician and performer based in Brussels. The electric bass has been her main instrument since 2011. Over the last decade, she has been playing different musical genres, including blues, jazz and hip-hop, and performing in different constellations, often solo or as a duo. This issue of //\ hoekhuis features Farida’s audio work Solo Wesserling, which she recorded at a water tower in the Elzas in France. We interview Farida remotely on a Sunday afternoon in February.

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm working on a new album, that I’ll be recording next week. As someone who improvises, it’s not that easy for me to record my music. I usually play for an audience, which gives me a lot of energy, and I’m not that comfortable when I record in a studio setting. On the other hand, we’re not supposed to be comfortable all the time when we improvise. So let’s see, it could work out well.


How do you prepare for the album? And how do you make decisions on what to release?

I just spent a week playing at Les Ateliers Claus for a residency, where Julien Desprez will join me for a few days before we go into the studio. To feel each other's energy, and play shorter and longer pieces to work on timing and duration. And to focus on sound. We both play really loud, so we will have to find a way to make that work in the studio. But in the end I think it’s impossible for me to actually prepare for the studio. You never know what will happen when you record. 

When I play solo, I record long pieces. I always keep the entire recording, even if I’m not sure whether I like the beginning. I want it to be live and authentic. If I don't like a recording one day, I may like it the day after. I usually listen to a recorded piece once or twice. Then I decide whether or not to use it, and I work on the mastering.


You mention the beginning of a piece. I imagine that when you start improvising, it takes some time before you’re really into it?

Absolutely. When I improvise, I always feel like getting into a kind of trance. In the beginning, I'm still very conscious of what I do. I ask myself too many questions and I'm a bit insecure. But when I continue and things are coming together, I get into a trance. That’s when I'm more happy about what I'm playing, because I don’t think about it anymore. The beginning feels more like the start of a sports game. I have to accept that.


Your main instrument is the bass, and it allows you to experiment a lot with texture and sound. What excites you most about this?

I love exploring the possibilities of the bass, and I’m always looking for new sounds. Everytime I play, I discover a new small part on the body of the instrument that sounds different. First I hit the wood - still without any effects - and I listen carefully. Then I start to play around with the amplifier: what happens when I put more bass for instance. After that, I usually start adding a few effects, which alter the sound completely again. In the end, there are so many different combinations possible, and I feel like this process always brings me something new.


I was wondering how you study. I was reading that for a few years, you played five hours per day. What does your practice of studying look like today?

Today, when I study, I mostly improvise. When I started to play the bass ten years ago, I was studying regular scales on my bass, often Modal Jazz stuff. But I also learned a lot from live concerts of improvised music. At the time I was really interested in saxophone players and their virtuosity. I think I copied their way of playing when I was learning how to improvise. I have also always been impressed by drummers, and they for sure inspired the rhythmic element in my playing. However, today I don't practice my instrument so regularly anymore. I don't have time to play five hours a day, but I’m practicing on stage when I play concerts, or when I’m doing a residency. I’m now experimenting more with synthesizers and Hip Hop and Drum & Bass rhythms, and I feel I’m also learning and taking that into my improvised work on the bass.


You’ve been studying Jazz before. A paradox in Jazz may be that you are free by means of improvisation, but on the other hand tied down to strong traditions and lineages. Do you feel connected to any lineage, or do you feel you're trying to break free from that?

Jazz is improvisation. When it started, musicians were just improvising, and only later on their tunes would be written down. Today in jazz schools you have to learn a tune or a solo by heart. I don't know if I really get that, because someone actually improvised that music. It’s not that I’m actively escaping from traditions, but I feel more connected to how Jazz musicians improvise and play their music. 


Do you have an archive of unfinished work?

I do have an archive, but it's quite messy. Before and during the lockdown I was recording a lot, so I have a whole lot of recordings on a SD card in my Zoom recorder. One day, I will have to take a week off to listen to everything, and decide what to do with it. Now that I think about these recordings...  When I started to improvise, I was playing a lot with friends from Liège in a free improv music collective. We were recording almost every session, and I was listening every week to what I recorded. This is how I learned more about my vocabulary. I found out what was working, and what wasn't. I was also trying to remember how I felt at the moment of recording. I learned a lot from this active listening to what I played.


You mention the collective in Liège you were part of, and throughout the years you've been doing a lot of collaborations. Which reminds of Brian Eno's idea of ‘scenius’, that there's often a lot of innovation happening in thriving scenes where artists collaborate. How does collaborating inform your work?

The collective in Liège was really important for me. The first concert of improv music I ever saw was them playing a session, and it was with this group that I started to improvise. One of the members of the collective bought me my first effect pedal for the bass. By playing together with this group, I learned how to listen to others. And at the same time, how to listen better to myself. 

Unlike before, I try to limit the number of collaborations and deepen them, while focussing on my solo work and further developing my vocabulary. When I play alone, I can really lose myself. This also happens when I play with others, but to a lesser extent, because you have to be more attentive to what will happen between you. In a way, I see playing solo as a collaboration too: between me and my instrument. For a while I noticed that I wasn’t creating any new things, and I decided to reconnect with the bass by collaborating with others. Now I feel connected with my instrument again, also when I play solo.

You mentioned you will go to the Royal Museum for Fine Arts Brussels after this conversation, to tweak your installation ‘In-Between’ that you are presenting there. Would you like to tell more about the process of how it came to be?

I was asked to develop an audiovisual installation for the Europalia Arts Festival with the theme Trains & Tracks. The artistic director Mark Jacobs saw a video of me and the bass, and the strings made him think of the train tracks. I always wanted to do something with piano strings, so I made a drawing for a possible instrument, and asked my close friend and musician Pavel Tchikov if he could help me out. He had always wanted to build a plate reverb, so we started to think about how to bring the piano strings together with this, and about the music it would play. We ended up with two plate reverbs and two transducers, with 4 jack inputs on each side. I composed a piece inspired by the rhythms of the trains: a drone that is played through the plate reverb. In between the plates are eight piano strings and two guitar mics to amplify them. People can play with the instrument, while listening and responding to the drone. The installation also includes video footage I recorded while taking the train in Belgium, between Brussels and Antwerp, Oostende and Mechelen. So yeah, the installation became a giant string instrument! It was not easy, but it was an interesting process and I'm happy with the result.


Do you feel like developing more instruments in the future?

Yes, for sure. Together with artist Bram Van Breda, I want to mix tapestries with sound, and we are investigating how to include electric cables in tapestries that would allow us to create music.

Do you have an ideal workspace in mind? Like the studio where you will record this week, or a space where you can create instruments, or a place you once played before?

I'm always on the move, and I really like that, because there is a different energy to every space. So for now, I enjoy working that way and I don't need my own studio. The stage is my main workspace. And when I really need a studio to focus, I'm doing a residency.

How are these different spaces part of your work, in what ways do they feed into your music?

Every space is challenging in its own way. You have to be committed to play with these challenges, and I enjoy this process very much. The spaces where I play always bring something new, and it's very nourishing for my vocabulary. It’s also one of the reasons why I like traveling a lot and play concerts in different types of spaces, or out on the street. For instance when I played at the Mont des Arts in Brussels, I played outdoors but under the arcades of the library which brought a nice reverb to it. Other spaces can be quite difficult to perform, such as churches where electronic instruments usually don’t work well. 

One day, I worked in an old water tower of 52 meters high, which had a super big reverb. I was just setting up my effect pedals and plugged into my amp, and suddenly there was such a nice delay effect when I touched my bass. Wow! The water tower is part of a big complex in a little village in the Elzas in France, where a community Collectif des Possibles lives and organizes concerts and residencies. I went there in 2017 to record solo work, and as a duo together with a drummer from the collective in Liège. I kept the recordings somewhere in my archive, on an SD card. I will find it.

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Château d’eau, Collectif des Possibles
Fellering, France.

Photo by Vladimir Lutz.