Band der Woche: Gloria de Oliveira

Als ich zum ersten Mal die Musik von Gloria de Oliveira gehört habe, war ich sofort verzaubert und tief berührt (LINK). Zwischen Traum und Dunkelheit entfaltet die Künstlerin ihre eigene, geheimnisvolle Klangwelt, die eine fragile Schönheit in sich trägt; mit einer ganz eigenen stillen Intensität und einer Stimme, die selbst zum tragenden Instrument der vielseitigen Kompositionen wird. Nach ihrem jüngsten, eindringlichen Stück „White hands“ mit ihrem Projekt lovespells und vor der Veröffentlichung des neuen Soloalbums The Lying Swans spricht Gloria im Interview über ihre frühen Erinnerungen an Musik. Sie erzählt von ihrer Faszination für emotionale Dualität, vom Einfluss von Literatur, Religion und Märchen auf ihr kreatives Arbeiten und über der Bedeutung von Intuition, Kollaboration und Vielseitigkeit in ihrem Schaffensprozess.

Foto 1: © Beto Ruiz Alonso

When did music first become a part of your life? Was there a moment when you fell in love with sound itself?
I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t part of my life. Some of my earliest childhood memories are dancing and singing along to the music my parents played (lots of Bossa Nova & MPB, ABBA, Eurythmics, Beach Boys) and what my older sister listened to on MTV and on her cassette player (Nirvana, Sinead O’Connor, Garbage, Ton Steine Scherben, Pearl Jam). I soon fell in love with writing my own music. I remember writing songs about horses and flowers and teaching them to my friends in primary school. After school I would spend hours locked away singing and tinkering on the piano. At some point, this probably made my family lose their minds, so my mother made me get piano lessons and introduced me to a wonderful Brazilian opera singer that she had met, Norma Starling. I started taking voice lessons with her, and she guided me into the world of opera and Art Song – intense, tormented love at first sight. For a long time, I thought that would be my life.

If you had to describe your music without using any musical terminology, how would you portray it?
Oh, I think I’d rather leave the task of describing my music to music journalists and listeners. I prefer not to reflect on my own work too much in this manner.

Outside of music, what artistic influences have most shaped your creative approach?
So much, hard to choose from! Right now, I’d say I read a lot of poetry. My favourites are Anne Sexton, Florbela Espanca, Cecília Meireles, Sappho, Keats, Rilke, Else Lasker-Schüler, Guillaume Apollinaire. Fiction by Clarice Lispector, Angela Carter, Anais Nin. I also can’t deny the influence of my catholic background (and Brazilian syncretism), its liturgy and religious texts. Fairytales, always. I collect them.

With your background in visual arts and film, how have these disciplines influenced the way you listen, compose, and perform?
This is one of the questions I get asked the most. I struggle to find an interesting answer, as working in multiple disciplines has always just been my natural state of existing – and I don’t feel special in this regard, as most of my friends operate the same way. My relationship to different mediums changes all the time… I’d say one important factor is that being active in several disciplines has the advantage of preventing boredom and frustration, to a degree. When I’ve been editing a video for weeks, I get giddy at the thought of entering a vocal booth again or practicing an instrument, and vice versa. It keeps things fresh.

Foto 2 & 4: © Hannah Häseker / Foto 3: © Beto Ruiz Alonso

Your sound exists between beauty and darkness, fragility and strength. What draws you to that emotional duality?
This duality you mention reflects my interest in the full spectrum of human existence. „A Rose of Iron, Lips of Blood”. We cannot have one without the other. As above, so below. The eternal struggle to remain tender in situations where one would rather harden. The risks of making oneself vulnerable, the risks of surrendering – to other people, to dreams, to life. I’m an extreme romantic in that sense, as French Filmmaker Catherine Breillat defines it: “I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‚romantic‘ doesn’t mean ’sugary.‘ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.” Even my darkest pieces are based on hope and longing – and I do try to not perpetuate cynicism and nihilism too much in my work, though of course they’re familiar emotions, as I am human. However, to me, even an album such as NIN’s The Downward Spiral contains a lot of beauty and feels like a rallying cry of being alive.

Where do you draw the ideas for your compositions from, a more biographical-emotional approach or a more conceptual one?
It’s usually a potent mixture of both. For a piece to be personal it doesn’t have to be strictly auto-biographical, though I don’t shy away from that. I relate to filmmaker Chris Marker‘s stance on the personal in art: “Contrary to what people say, using the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: ‚All I have to offer is myself.’”
At the same time, what Werner Herzog calls ‘Ecstatic Truth’ resonates with me – trying to distill something universal that is beyond mere fact: “The Manhattan phone directory, four million correct entries do not illuminate us. We do not know why is James Miller, and there are probably 200 different James Millers with correct address, and so why is he crying in his pillow every night? We do not know that. That’s my approach that is beyond or outside of facts, and it requires stylizations. It requires somehow shaping, creating something like poetry, a sense of poetry that gives us an approach into truth. Truth, I understand, is something vaguely somewhere at the horizon. It’s out there. I’m fairly sure. The intense quest for it and search for it, the approach to it is worthwhile, and that’s what I’m doing in films and in literature and in everything I do. (Source)

How are your music pieces created? Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? Where does improvisation end and intuition begin for you?
The impulses are always there, incessantly – the challenge is to listen to and honour them. Keeping the channels open, cultivating the discipline to capture what comes through. One of my favourite parts of writing a song is going after that first intuitive spark and then diving headfirst into research to flesh it out – a million tabs open in my browser, fifty books spread out around me.

Your recent release, ‘White Hands’, with your side-project lovespells feels haunting, intimate, and dreamlike. What kind of imagery or emotional undercurrents inspired the song, and how did those ideas shape its sonic landscape?
To me, ‘White Hands’ felt proto-gothic from the start, so I kept thinking of 1970s Gothic Pulp Paperbacks – their evocative titles and cover art – as well as 19th century novels such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Carmilla’. I was also inspired by some of my favourite operas, such as Donizetti’s „Lucia di Lammermoor“ and Purcell’s „Dido and Aeneas.“ The women in all these works are either haunted or are themselves haunting spirits, sometimes both at the same time, a dynamic that has always fascinated me. The use of their voices to lament their pain is often a central element. ‘White Hands’ directly references Melpomene from Greek mythology (“she, who sings”) who was destined to sing laments for the deceased, especially poets, after their deaths. Generally speaking, Spampoets and I are both geeks and into fantasy, science fiction, and genre cinema and literature, so some of that influence is always reflected sonically and thematically.

How does working within lovespells differ from your solo work? What does working with lovespells mean to you compared to your solo work? How would you describe your creative dynamic when working on songs together with Spampoets?
Collaborations are an important counterpart to my solo work. The magic of exploring common ground, while delving into unfamiliar approaches. I enjoy the balance; after a long period of collaboration, I rejoice in diving back into working by myself, no compromises. With lovespells, in the very beginning I saw it as sort of a “pop experiment” – inhabiting more of a defined sound and persona, compared to what I do under my own name. There’s a lot of fun to be had with that – Spampoets and I love experimenting freely with Synth Pop and Dark Wave conventions. Between the two of us, we never run out of things to be excited about, so who knows what direction lovespells might take in the future!

Foto 5: © Christoph Hoyer / Foto 6: © Beto Ruiz Alonso / Foto 7: Marc Bogman

You just came back from tour, what do you look forward to the most when playing live?
The immediate connection with the people listening can be extremely rewarding and reinvigorating. That’s also what I cherish about putting out music through my own label – even though it’s a tonne of admin work, of course.

How would you describe the world you are trying to create during your performances?
It always depends on the context of the show and I like changing things up… but after a recent performance in Sweden, a guy came up to me afterwards and said “it felt as though I was entering an enchanted, misty forest… with trolls!” I certainly loved that.

Looking ahead, what’s next for you? Are there upcoming projects or collaborations you’re particularly excited to explore?
I recently, finally, finished work on a solo album called ‚The Lying Swans‘, which I had already started writing soon after releasing ’Fascination’, and before starting work on ‘Oceans of Time’. So it’s been a long time in the making and I can’t wait to release it. Beyond that, I’ve been working on a few beautiful collaborative projects – one of them with Tor Lundvall, who is not only an artist I deeply admire, but has also become a dear friend.

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Foto 8 & 9: © Beto Ruiz Alonso

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