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plux quba

Moikai Chicago, USA M1 (CD, 1998)

I was involved with the Ama Romanta label when Plux Quba was released. I saw the concert where Nuno presented his works (an extremely rare one), and that's how the decision to release a record of his was taken. I used to listen to a cassette copy of the original master, before the release, which had 3 tracks that had to be cut for lack of room on the vynil. I was a big fan of his, amazed at the magic of that music. Nuno would always joke at me, humbly saying that i was probably one of the only three or four people who would care to listen to it.

Well, many years later i get an email from Jim on an almost desperate tone, like "Help! I want to reissue this record!!". He was already hooked by it. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about the story of how influential it had become in the late 90's german electronic music scene, i was really happy. Then i went "hey, cool down, Nuno's been a friend of mine for years, sure i'll help you get it done..." It was not easy. I had to locate the tapes and recover them, and i found out they were losing the oxide. I didn't know about tape baking at the time (sometimes ignorance is dangerous), so every 2 or 3 minutes of tape transfer to DAT i had to stop and clean the tape machine's heads and guides. Later in my studio i reassembled all the bits in the computer, and recovered the tracks left out of the vinyl release. I still did the mastering and sent everything to Jim.

Nuno Canavarro has always lived in Cascais, a town about 30 Km west of Lisbon, by the seaside. After the Moikai reissue, i spent hours on the phone with him, trying to convince him to produce some more music. He was always reluctant, while he's been working on music for film (of which i heard some, and it's unfortunately far from Plux Quba) and presently he seems to be inclined to stop making music and work with video. Sad, i know. I did what i could.
Rafael Toral, from an interview by Dan Warburton for the Wire, 2006.

reviews

Nuno Canavarro: Plux Quba
Original issue: Ama Romanta (1988)
Reissue: Moikai (1998)
In the age of the Internet arcane information is only a few clicks away. Arguments over which character actor appeared in a movie, arguments that years ago would have raged for months and involved someone writing in to Parade Magazine for a definitive answer, can now be settled in the time it takes to log on and head over to the Internet Movie Database. A single brain is just not an efficient storehouse for detailed information, and there's no need to remember trivia anymore. The Internet remembers it for us.
Given the explosion of available information, it's rare now that a work of art goes public while its maker remains anonymous. Somewhere along the way an interview happens or a press release is re-written, and the results get posted on a Web site somewhere. Sometimes, however, by choice or circumstance, anonymity happens. Due to peculiarities of timing, a language barrier, and (most important), a brief recording history, Portuguese musician Nuno Canavarro has essentially remained anonymous, almost twenty years after he started working in music.
To say Canavarro biography is sketchy is an understatement. I don’t know when he was born or the details of his early musical interests. So near the ground is Canavarro's profile, in fact, it occurred to me that he might be a hoax, some canny exercise in media manipulation broadcast by a cynical hipster. I suppose fraud remains a possibility, but I was convinced of Canavarro's flesh and blood existence by the many Portuguese web pages that referenced his music. Seeding a prank in two languages just seemed like too much trouble for a cheap laugh. From these Portuguese sites, I learned that Canavarro played keyboards in the early 80s with a moderately successful New Wave band called Street Kids, who at their peak opened for Tangerine Dream. Street kids disbanded in 1983, and we next pick up the trail five years later, when Canavarro released his first and only solo record. He titled this small masterpiece of electroacoustic composition Plux Quba.
Plux Quba flew far under the radar at the time of its release, and it might have remained essentially unheard outside Portugal's experimental music crowd had it not fallen into the hands of a few key people, including tireless Chicago musician Jim O'Rourke. A story circulated that O'Rourke, Jan St. Werner (of Mouse on Mars and Microstoria), and Carsten Schulz (who has recorded as C-Schulz, and with Hans-Juergen Schunk as C-Schulz & Hajsch) came across a copy of Plux Quba while traveling through Europe together in 1991 and fell in love with what they heard. O'Rourke started a record label called Moikai in 1998, and his first release was a reissue of Plux Quba, remixed and remastered by Portuguese guitarist and composer Rafael Toral.
This tale sounds a bit apocryphal to those familiar with both the record and the characters, because Plux Quba sounds so tightly bound with music all three would later create. It's almost too easy to say that Microstoria, Jan St. Werner's experimental ambient project with Oval's Markus Popp, was "inspired" by Plux Quba, because the latter, in its use of small, quivering sounds, clicks and pops, sounds like such an obvious forbearer. Something similar can be said of the self-titled C-Schulz & Hajsch album, and some of O'Rourke's electronic works. All occupy a soundworld similar to Plux Quba, yet Canavarro's record was recorded in 1988, a couple years before even the ambient house of artists like the Orb, and well before the idea of abstract "laptop music" emerged.
If you stand back and consider Plux Quba objectively, it seems without precedent and years before its time. In short, the fact that this album was initially recorded in 1988 is nothing short of amazing. But so what? Obscurity and "being ahead of one's time" don't necessarily have anything to do with quality. These subjective characteristics are of interest to would-be musicologists and trainspotters, not to those squatting before their CD rack, searching the spines for something interesting to listen to on a Tuesday evening. Surely the most essential qualities of Plux Quba, are not its puzzling origins, startling originality or eerie prescience, but that it is warm, playful, pretty and endlessly listenable.
Still, it would be dishonest to deny that the mystery of Plux Quba adds to its appeal. The fact is I'm particularly curious about Nuno Canavarro because this record seems so personal; I listen and feel like I know him. Plux Quba is a disjointed, unpredictable work that sounds like the aural representation one sensitive and intelligent individual's subconscious thoughts. Like a mind, Plux Quba veers from one fragment to the next, leapfrogs over an idea and lands on another, recalls a forgotten memory for an instant only to have it vanish before it can be examined in detail. Some of the fifteen tracks (only seven are titled) run for about a minute, the longest is just over five, and all bleed one into the next. The connection between these musical fragments becomes clear after repeated listens, and they eventually coalesce into a unified and uncommonly intimate expression. Because Plux Quba sounds so personal and idiosyncratic, I can't help but yearn for a few facts about its maker to complete the story.
Those blanks may never be filled, but I still have the record. Canavarro is credited on the sleeve with electronics, melodica, and pre-recorded tapes. Some of the pre-recorded material captures the sound of acoustic instruments, such as the glowing harp that provides the foundation of "Wask," but the most memorable use of tapes are the ghostly voices that appear throughout the album. These vocalizations take many forms - they speak Portuguese, utter syllables without words, spin gracefully backward, and, occasionally, sing. It has been noted that Canavarro's murmuring, indistinct vocal cut-ups bear a resemblance to Robert Ashley's 1979 piece "Automatic Writing," where Ashley explored the idea of involuntary utterances over the course of a quiet 40-minute composition. Whether Ashley's piece inspired Canavarro I cannot say, but these voices seem to be serve a similar intermediary role between composer and listener, valiantly attempting to articulate the confused, aching, but ultimately grateful heart at the center of Plux Quba.
The voices convey a range of moods and scenes with striking vividness. I picture the young woman casually singing beneath plinking chords on "Bruma" to be walking down a beach on an overcast afternoon in Lagos, the broken synthesizer noodling acting as a soundtrack accompaniment to the cinematic scene. Track 5 sounds like a transcription of a psychotherapy session braided with a fourth-generation master of Brian Eno's Music for Airports; there's something almost voyeuristic about it, and I'd feel guilty listening in if the vocalizations weren't processed beyond recognition. And the minute-long track 13, with a baby singing over chopped-up, glitch-laden organ chords (sounding all the world like an interlude on Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children), explores the uncertain terrain of a child's outlook.
The lovely sixth track has a classical air to it, as a soprano voice is spun backward alongside reversed strings and organ chords, but most of the record has the cozy feel of folk music, despite the primarily electronic origins. Track 7 uses small organ gurgles to simulate a chorus of birds, and it's particularly odd because it's so clearly "fake" and yet sounds organic and true, like these are the calls of the birds as a certain off-kilter brain remembers it. The wistful, nostalgic "Cave" is among the album's most affecting tracks, with nervous, hesitant hand percussion forming the rhythmic foundation for meandering organ chords and a plaintive melodica melody. It's like a sad end to a period of prolonged joy, and then the untitled closing track that follows, consisting of little more than a simple music-box keyboard melody, takes an even more beautiful and melancholy turn. This confluence of thoughts and emotions, streaming along endlessly with the imprecision of a human mind, makes Plux Quba a wonderful space to inhabit.
Mark Richardson, Sound Collector 2002