Watch a short film that accompanies three tracks from sound artist and musician Adrián de Alfonso’s new album Viator.
Pleamar is a short film that links three tracks – “Pleamar”, “Esquejes De Un Buen Samán” and “Arden” – from Adrián de Alfonso’s latest album, Viator (Maple Death).
The film is a collaboration between the Berlin based sound artist and musician and Spanish director Jorge M Fontana. De Alfonso describes how the project emerged from the discovery of some video material by Barcelona School of Film founder and influential Spanish director Jacinto Esteva.
“One day, after witnessing one of my wildest and most chaotic live performances with FM transmitters and radios that I can remember, Jorge told me that he had just got hold of some obscure lost video material by one of our favourite directors: Jacinto Esteva,” he explains. “He told me that the material, which portrayed the hunting of a wildebeest in Mozambique, bore strange similarities to my new ways of making music. A year later, Daria Esteva, Jacinto’s daughter, heard “Pleamar”, the rusty ballad that opens Viator, and encouraged us to use her father’s material as a framework for a video of the song.”
Fontana elaborates on the conceptual links between footage of a hunt and de Alfonso’s music: “Essentially, the video for Pleamar tries to convey the impression I get every time I listen to Adrián’s new album,” he says. “Songs that crawl like beasts on the prowl, watching and sniffing out your steps in a constant tension. And each new listen becomes a deadly scenario of hunters and hunted where nobody’s going to escape.”
Viator, which means traveller in Latin, was recorded using piezos and cheap microphones in de Alfonso’s bedroom in Berlin, a bathroom without vents in the Alpujarra of Granada, and some desert locations around Almería.
Read Louis Pattison’s review of Viator in The Wire 490. Wire subscribers can also read the review online via the digital library.
