Hugo Race
Five Questions To Hugo Race

I believe I have what can be described as a kind of "devotion" towards this musician. The first time I saw him play live (thankfully I had other chances too) was a moment of great inspiration for me: an experience that opened my mind and broadened my horizons as a listener and as an individual. But that wasn’t the only time. Over the years, Hugo Race has continued to play this role that I would describe as "mediumistic" between me and new worlds, literally flinging doors open and paving new ways to boundaries never crossed before. Places close and distant in space and time. The latest boundary is the one he crossed with the latest album released under Dirtmusic, entitled "Bu Bir Ruya" (review here: https://www.debaser.it/dirtmusic/bu-bir-ruya/recensione), coming out next week on Glitterhouse and recorded in Turkey in Istanbul with the collaboration (besides Chris Eckman—obviously) of a historical and influential musician like Murat Ertel and Umit Akalake.

What follows is a chat with Hugo that starts from Melbourne in Australia and then becomes a true journey around the world, also touching upon the musical and cultural history of our country from within, with which Hugo has a historically important relationship. I think the content of his answers is something interesting regardless of the musical aspect. Even though, let’s be honest, how can you consider something as important and full of emotions, history, and suggestions as music as separate from what we call life?

Happy reading.

1. Hi Hugo. Thanks for giving me this interview. There are many things I’d like to ask you, so I decided to start from what we could define as the beginning. You were born in Melbourne in the early sixties. Can it be said that growing up in this context somehow pushed you to start playing? When you started playing, was there a scene around you? Which artists do you consider your main influences? What do you say about the Australian scene today? Are there new musicians and groups you'd like to mention?

HUGO. Looking back, I think that the world of music in general, both in terms of new technologies and the spiritual aspect, has changed in an incredibly rapid way. All my memories regarding my childhood in the sixties come to me as if they are filtered from another world where the greatest wonders were realized with plastic and with a label that said "Made In Japan" and time appears forever blurred like those long hot summers burning on the beach. My older brothers and sister rode the wave of the hippy movement that was developing in Australia, and I believe I lived and grasped these types of experiences through their eyes, listening to their records, reading their books at a time when consciousness was changing, both mine and that of the world around me. It was the era of the Vietnam War. I read "Naked Lunch" when I was thirteen, and it influenced me positively: it was my first exposure to what we can define as a kind of virus that changed my language. Obsessed with music, I listened to everything I could, which was very limited. I remember a lot of things through the music I listened to while growing up, you can define it if you prefer as music before conscious listening, it was a limited but powerful collection of records and all this surely influenced what I did later, I’m talking about late sixties rock and folk mixed with some classics. And then there was that music I could hear in my head, but it took me many years to recognize it.

At that time, the pre-internet era, Australia was light years away from anywhere. So one of the first records I bought at that time was a triple LP from the Sunbury Festival of 1973. Sunbury was in the outskirts of Melbourne; the festival was organized to be a kind of Woodstock Made in Australia. The album mostly encapsulated all that could be considered the musical culture of that period—a lot of heavy rock, blues, and progressive and some bands that mixed all these sounds together. I liked it much more than the pop music they played on my transistor radio, most of which was bubblegum music. Somewhere and at some point, I started to learn to play the guitar. One of my brothers was in a progressive band and played the guitar and when the band broke up, me and a friend bought a lot of their equipment; I’m talking about very old-fashioned equipment but we used it to start our own band, a band we formed during school that indirectly acquired the name "Plays With Marionettes". It was the first band with which I started playing concerts around the city. In this way, I got in touch with the punk/new wave scene. I was only sixteen and at that moment, incredible bands like Birthday Party / Boys Next Door or Dead Can Dance started to emerge; in those years (between the late seventies and early eighties) a lot of good music really came out and all this had a great influence on me and I, we all influenced each other, there was a continuous exchange of energies and attitudes, nihilistic and primitive, that we decided to adopt making them something of our own with that charge you can only have when you’re 18: idealism and naivety at the same time, a kind of distorted purity.

2. Over the years, you have taken part in many projects and collaborated with an incredible number of musicians. The feeling is that you have a marked attitude to seek interaction and contact with other musicians and different musical realities each time. This concerns the musical aspect but also, in general, the cultural aspects of every different place which are nevertheless somehow linked to different sounds. Is this statement correct? How much has this aspect conditioned you over the years both as a musician and generally in your personal and private life?

HUGO. Practically, I combined my natural curiosity, the desire to travel, and the hunger and urge to make music when I started touring and traveling the world. I also wrote about this in my book "Road Series": I talked about how music and territory and climate and culture are all connected to each other. Music is this sea of sound that surrounds us every day but is also actually connected to rivers and the ocean. I can't stand not being able to deepen the sound and its meaning and connections and cultural references and resonances. Depth begins where action starts. The echo of humanity echoes around the world, and this challenges us to discover both what is familiar to us and the unknown. "Collaborative" music and all projects I have embarked on or stumbled upon were and are still today a way to learn something from other people and at the same time these people teach you something about yourself and perhaps in the meantime you also create something new musically. A hybrid that reflects a reality in continuous and rapid change in which everything is practically only a new degree of separation.

3. In recent years I have been really impressed by one of your projects in particular. I’m talking about the "Dirtmusic", the project you began with two other great musicians like Chris Brokaw and Chris Eckman. That project literally flung open the doors to an entire world which would be the music and culture of North-West Africa and what would be the Tuareg music, the one they call "tishoumaren". Among other things, you also recorded and collaborated with Tamikrest’s Ousmane Ag Mossa. How did you start to become interested in this type of culture? Can we say you took a sort of journey into the past to seek the origins of blues music? I also wanted to ask you if you consider yourself primarily as a blues musician or if you think this is a limited definition.

HUGO. Consider true blues musicians the African-Americans of the generation of greats like John Lee-Hooker or Son House, these were the true blues musicians. They made history in their time and left behind legends and music and a cultural model to follow, different viewpoints of making music compared to the past and in which songs are effectively a kind of microcapsules of emotions and memories shot into space.

I don’t exactly consider myself as a blues musician. Truly, I’m not much interested in defining myself in any way; I’m too busy pulling myself out of any label because there are a lot of different worlds within popular music. But I have certainly been greatly influenced by the blues (as well as other genres) and I use it a lot in my compositions as a basic form and as a nuance.

In "John Lee Hooker’s World Today" we went deeply into the history of blues, for what concerns the vibe, the method, the ritual, and the style, without considering the predefined twelve-bar form, we considered the way of playing the basses and the beat, the various patterns and the way to extrapolate these and insert them into the context of each composition. What really helped me was going on tour with Michelangelo for three months. We played about 70 concerts and, in the end, I really felt like I understood what we were really doing. You have to get your hands dirty to do a good job. Things don’t come out easily, nothing happens by chance, you have to fight to win.

It was the same with Dirtmusic in Mali, we didn’t know anything, we probably didn’t even know exactly why we were there. Yes, we were following the tracks of blues music history to its origins, but it wasn’t only this, I also wanted to distance myself in some way from certain patterns and to take a step back from everything I had already done and known and to learn something new. Meeting Ousmane and the Tamikrest was a turning point for everyone involved in this project. No one could have known what would happen. We had a lot of fun playing in the desert, it’s something that I still carry inside me today and that continues to influence me in what I do both consciously and unconsciously.

4. I think I’m not wrong if I say that you have a special connection with our country (Ndr. Italy.). I have seen you play live a lot of times and with different projects. I clearly remember that time in Naples, which is the city where I was born and where I live, when you performed the "The Merola Matrix" project live. It was really something fun. What an absurd idea! In any case, over the years you have collaborated with many Italian musicians, starting with Marta Collica (who is also the other half of the “Sepiatone” project) but also Manuel Agnelli and the Afterhours, Cesare Basile and in particular lately with the ensemble Sacri Cuori, who are practically now full-time members of your current band: Hugo Race Fatalists. How did this relationship with our country begin and what do you think of the Italian music scene? In any case—obviously starting from music—do you feel a special connection with our history and our culture?

HUGO. Yes. I really must have a strong connection with Italy. I don’t think I can explain this. I’m not religious but I feel a kind of fatalism, what we can call predestination, and I try to follow this guide also in my work. I must say that in this case, it’s no coincidence that the Fatalists are an Italian band. The meeting with Sacri Cuori was at the same time a convergence of ideas and interests in music but also a crossing of fate. We recorded "We Never Had Control" and "24 Hours To Nowhere" together. Antonio Gramentieri, Diego Sapignoli, and Checco Giampaoli bring unique qualities to the table, and I think this also brings Italian influences to my sound and in particular for what concerns typical sonorities and flavors of the Romagnolo region. They have their own unique style that they can only have coming from that particular background. I started spending a lot of time in Italy starting from the nineties. My wife is Abruzzese, she grew up in Australia and we started coming here more and more often from Berlin and we made a lot of friends and then one thing led to another. So I ended up living in Sicily for a period. In those years I set up the Sepiatone project and recorded "In Sepiatone" and "Dark Summer" with Marta Collica and Cesare Basile and with Dounia, the Dining Rooms, and Giovanni Ferrario.

I think all these experiences regarding my connection with Italy can be summarized with "The Merola Matrix", which for me was a kind of study of the South through its popular music and my reactions to these vintage footage. In the beginning, I just wanted to work with material related to Mario Merola, but the Zo Centro in Catania, which supported the project, pushed me to include part of the Sicilian culture. It took me three or four years to dig deep into it, I needed time, and I needed to collaborate with great musicians, sound and video technicians. At some point, I’d like to bring a Matrix 2.0 version live to Naples.

5. I recently wrote (here: https://www.debaser.it/hugo-race-and-michelangelo-russo/john-lee-hookers-world-today/recensione) about your album in collaboration with Michelangelo Russo which practically consists of a tribute to John Lee Hooker (Ndr. "John Lee Hooker’s World Today, Gusstaff Records) in which you revisited some of the classics of one of blues history’s fundamental figures, reinterpreting them in a way that I still consider very personal. I must say that I really liked the album and this in particular because in paying homage to John Lee Hooker you put a lot of yourself into it, thus creating a special relationship with what I think is one of your favorite artists. Can you tell us something more about this album? Why a tribute to John Lee Hooker? How was it to collaborate with Michelangelo Russo? Can you tell us more about him? Last question: what are you working on at the moment? Should we expect something new in the near future?

HUGO. "John Lee Hooker’s World Today" was never meant to be a project. It was an idea that developed in a casual way. A Berlin club promoter asked me if I wanted to do a live set of old fifties rhythm and blues songs and I suggested playing Hooker and people seemed to enjoy it, so we carried on with it and recorded the album in one day in Berlin live in the studio bringing it out all from its acoustic dimension. I like Hooker’s work and I looked for a way to say modernize the vibe and bring this sound to a younger audience, creating at the same time something new. It was a nice journey for me and Mica, a journey into the past to our roots, but also into our strange future (now) where (in a similar way) technology meets delta blues in a kind of collision.

Michelangelo Russo is an abstract painter from southern Italy who now lives in Melbourne and is one of my best friends. We lived in Berlin at the same time and then met again in Australia. We have mutual friends, Mica invited me to his studio to play some blues together. There were gigantic canvases on the walls, and paintings and chemicals everywhere, huge artworks. This happened in 1994 and we’ve worked together ever since the period of True Spirit and in other experimental projects like Transfargo. Mica isn’t exactly a professional musician, so with him, there are no rules—he plays in exactly the same way he paints, in a way full of abstract energy.

I’m always working on new music and new projects.

Next week my new album with Dirtmusic will be released! It is called "Bu Bir Ruya" and was recorded a year ago in Istanbul with the great Turkish musician and psychedelic saz master Murat Ertel. I love this record, it is loaded with turbulent Turkish suggestions but at the same time retains traces of our work in Mali. It is a combination of all these things together and of everything that each musician involved brings to the table that makes its sound incredibly powerful, its rhythm, its cultural and political characters.

READ IT IN ENGLISH.

1. Hi Hugo. Thank you for releasing us this interview. There were a lot of things I wanted to ask you, so I decided to start from what we could consider as the beginning. You were born in Melbourne in the early sixties. Did that context give you any inspirations to start making music? When you started, you could say there was a musical scene around you? Who are the artists you could consider as your early influences? What about the Australian music scenes nowaday? There're some brand new groups or artists you want to mention?

HUGO. When I look back, the speed of change in music, in in the world generally, technologically and spiritually, was incredibly fast. I recall all kinds of child-filtered 60s memories from another world where the greatest novelties were made out of plastic stamped with ‘Made in Japan’ and time warped on forever through long hot summers burning up on the beach. My older brothers and sister caught the hippy wave breaking in Australia and I guess I absorbed it through their eyes, listened to their records, read their books in a moment where consciousness was shifting, both mine and the world around me. At the time, Vietnam was going on.

I read Naked Lunch when I was about thirteen, and that messed with my mind in a positive way – early exposure to the language virus. Obsessed with music, I listened to everything available, which was very very limited. I remember so much through the music I heard growing up, pre-conscious music you could call it, a limited but potent collection of records and all of it probably influenced what I have done since, late sixties rock and folk mixed up with some classical music. And then there was what I could hear in my head, and it took years to find it.

At that time, pre-internet, Australia was light years away from anywhere. So one of the first records I bought was a triple album of the Sunbury festival 1973. Sunbury was in the country outside Melbourne and it was created as a kind of Australian Woodstock. That album pretty much summarizes the musical culture of the time – a lot of heavy rock, blues and prog, some bands mixing it all together. I liked it a lot more than the factory pop music on the transistor radio, most of which was bubblegum. Somewhere, somewhen, I started learning to play guitar. One of my brothers was in a prog band playing guitar and when that band broke up, a friend and I bought some of their equipment, very primitive stuff but we used it to start our own band, a band we’d formed at school that indirectly became Plays With Marionettes, the band I first started playing shows with in the city. Through that, I became involved with the punk/new wave scene when I was about 16, incredible bands like Birthday Party/Boys Next Door, Dead Can Dance, actually a lot of exciting music exploding around 1980, all of this was influential and I was, we were, caught up in the flow of that, the sheer energy and attitude, nihilistic and primitive, we adopted it, made it our thing in a way that you can only do when you’re like eighteen years old – idealism, naivety, a kind of misguided purity.

2. Through the years you have taken part to a lot of projects and collaborated with an incredible number of musicians. The sensation it is that you have always had the attitude to interact with other musicians and other musical realities different from the one you grew up. It seems like you are effectively interested into everything has got to do with music and consequently with the cultures that the different sonorities are going some way to rapresent. Is this consideration right? How much has this thing conditioned you both as a person in your private life than as a musician?

HUGO. I pooled all my curiosity and wanderlust and music hunger together when I started traveling and touring. I wrote about this in my book, Road Series, about how it seems to me that music and terrain and climate and culture interconnect. Music is this sea of sound that surrounds us every day but its also connected to the rivers, the ocean. I get bored if I can’t go deep into the sound and meaning and connection and reference and evocation. Deep is where the action is. The visceral experience of being human echoes around the world, we echo each other to discover both the familiar and the unknown. Collaborative music, all the projects I embarked upon or stumbled into, were and still are an education where you learn from other people as they teach you about yourself, and in the process perhaps create new hybrid musical forms reflecting a high speed reality where everything is only one degree of separation away.

3. I was very impressed by one of your project in particular in the last years. I'm talking about 'Dirtmusic', the project you set up along with two other great musicians as Chris Brokaw and Chris Eckman. That project really opened my mind to an entire world that's the music and the culture from the North-West of Africa and realities like the tuareg music, the so-called 'tishoumaren'. In that context you also performed and recorded with Tamikrest by Ousmane Ag Mossa. How does it start your interest into that kind of culture? It is right to say that you made a travel into the past of the history of the blues to its origin? I wanted also to ask if it's substantially righ to consider you mainly as a blues musician and singer/songwriter or if you think that's a restricted definition.

HUGO. I see blues musicians as the elder generation black American greats like John Lee Hooker or Son House, all those guys are the real blues, they had their time and their space and left legends and music and kind of ways of being, alternative viewpoints into writing songs, into what songs actually are – microcapsules of emotion and memory blasted into space.

I don’t see myself as a blues musician. I don’t really care to define myself at all, I’m too busy trying to get out of that box because there are so many different musical worlds to inhabit. But I am influenced by blues (and everything else as well), and I use it in my work as frame and catalyst.

In John Lee Hooker’s World Today we went deep into it, the vibe, the method, the ritual, freestyle, no twelve-bar, the linear pulse of bass and beat, the pattern, the extraction. What really locked it all in was going on tour with Michelangelo for like 3 months, about 70 shows, I felt like I finally understood what I was, what we were trying to do. You have to get your hands dirty, you know, do some work. It doesn’t come easy, doesn’t just happen, you have to chase it down.

Like Dirtmusic in Mali, we didn’t know, couldn’t say what we were looking for exactly. Following the trail of the blues story back to the roots yes but not only, I also just wanted to shift the paradigm, the reference, get some distance from what I’d already done and find out more of what I don’t know. Meeting Ousmane and all of Tamikrest was a turning point for everyone involved in so many ways. No one could see that coming. We had a great time jamming in the desert, I can still here it somewhere far off in the distance, it continues to influence what I do in obvious and not so obvious ways.

4. Think I'm not wrong if I would say you have a special connection with our country (Ndr. Italy.). I see in fact you performing a lot of times and with different several projects. I also remember very well that time in Napoli, the city where I'm from and I actually live, when you performed live 'The Merola Matrix'. It was so nice. What a brilliant idea! By the way, you also collaborate along the years with a lot of Italian musicians, starting from the nice and amusing Marta Collica (who is also the other half part of your project 'Sepiatone'), but also Manuel Agnelli and Afterhours, Cesare Basile and in particular with the Italian ensemble Sacri Cuori, that are also members of your actual band, Hugo Race Fatalists. When you started to feel a relevant connection with this country and what do you think about the musical scene in Italy? In any case - starting obviously from music - do you feel a kind of connection with the Italian history and culture?

HUGO. Yes I guess I must have a strong connection with Italy. I can’t really explain it. I’m not religious but I do kind of feel a certain fatalism, a sense of predestination, and I try to work with it as a guide. I should say it is no accident Fatalists are an Italian band. Coming together with Sacri Cuori was a convergence of ideas and musical paths and personal twists of fate. We made records with names like We Never Had Control and 24 Hours to Nowhere. Antonio Gramentieri, Diego Sapignoli and Checco Giampaoli bring a totally unique and I think Italian sound to what I do, drawing on their roots and Romagnolo flavours. There is a style to this that could only happen here. I started spending a lot of time in Italy back in the nineties. My wife was Abruzzese, grown up in Australia and we started coming here to get out of Berlin for a while and we made some friends, doors open, one thing leads to another. I ended up living in Sicily for years around the time of the Sepiatone albums, In Sepiatone and Dark Summer, working with Marta Collica and Cesare Basile and other great Italian artists including Dounia (who collaborated with Sepiatone), The Dining Rooms and Giovanni Ferrario.

I think it all came together (my connection with Italia) in the Merola Matrix, which was really a kind of study of the mezzogiorno through its musica popolare and me reacting to it as raw footage. I was originally planning to just work with the Merola material, but the Zo Centro in Catania, who supported the project, wanted me to widen the focus to include more of the cultura Sicula. Over a period of three or four years I went deeper into the sound and concept, it took time, and it also took the willing collaboration of some great musicians, sound techs and video makers. Someday, we hope to bring the live Matrix 2.0 back to Napoli.

5. I recently wrote about your album collaboration with Michelangelo Russo and dedicated to John Lee Hooker (Ndr. 'John Lee Hooker's World Today', Gusstaff Records) in which you reprised some of the classic songs of one of the fundamental historical personalities into the history of blues, interpretating it into a way I would like to consider as it is your peculiar and own style. I have to say I apprecciated this album a lot and especially because you put into this homage a lot of yourself, creating a special connection between you and who I guess he is actually one of your favourite artists ever. Would you like to tell us something about this album? Why did you decide to make an homage to John Lee Hooker? How it was to collaborate with Michelangelo Russo? I don't know him very well. Do you want to introduce him to us? Final question: are you actually working on something new? Do we have to expect some new brand music from you soon?

HUGO. John Lee Hooker’s World Today was never planned as a project. It was an idea that evolved in a really casual way, a nightclub promoter in Berlin asked me to do a live set of backdated 50s RnB, I proposed just covering Hooker and people were really digging it so we moved forward and recorded the album in one day in Berlin, live in the studio, blasting it out through a PA system. I dig the work of Hooker and I could see a way to modernize the vibe and bring the sound to a new maybe younger audience, creating something new in the process. It was a fantastic trip for me and Mica, a journey into the past and back to our roots, but also into a strange future moment (now) where (analogue) techno meets the delta blues in our collision chamber.

Michelangelo Russo is an abstract painter from south Italy who lives in Melbourne and also one of my best friends. We lived in Berlin around the same time and met later in Australia. We had mutual friends, Mica invited me to his studio to jam out some acoustic blues just for kicks. There were these giant canvases on the walls and paint and chemicals all over the place, great artworks. That was 1994 and we’ve been working together ever since in the True Spirit and some other experimental projects like Transfargo. Mica’s thing is that he’s not a trained musician so there are no rules – he just plays and thinks like he paints, in high energy abstraction.

I’m always working on new music, new projects.

Next week the new Dirtmusic album will be released! It is called Bu Bir Ruya, and we recorded it in Istanbul a year ago with the great Turkish psyche-saz master, Murat Ertel. I love this album – it has this very strong subversive Turkish feel to it but somehow retains traces of our work in Mali, and the combination of everything and everybody involved has made it incredibly powerful in its beat and mood and politics.