Happy Sundays at the Vuela el Pez

NEWS

by Fabiola Feyt

Traslated by Kevin Vaughn

Photo by Carla Sanguineti

Last Sunday Macri won. Last Sunday I thought about my ex-boyfriend (and I called him). Last Sunday the sun finally appeared but when I got out of bed the clouds emerged and it felt like it was 40 degrees below zero. I took a walk, I got on the subway and it looked like everyone was hungover, between the hyper active high schoolers and the irritable fathers. I voted for nothing. I went to lunch with a girlfriend that was more anti-humanity than me, so I went home, showered and left to see Pablo Malaurie.

Just recently he returned from New York City, where he played at the Latin American Music Conference and took advantage of being able to play at a few friendly venues around the city. I always wonder how people from around the world react to Malaurie’s music. From Romania to Philadelphia. Love, heartbreak, piano, howls, sunny days and cloudy ones, unearthly noises, lightness and trumpets, those are things understood around the world, right ?

That same Sunday Pablo Malaurie played in Vuela de Pez for about ninety people that refused to let the cold bring them down. The art space located along Avenida Cordoba was full of garden furniture and couches, delicious pizzas and a lot of people sitting on the floor. The night began perfectly with the song Pesti Si Barcute, one of the Romanian songs that the ex Mataplantas songwriter composed (trip to Draculas homeland included) for Loverboy, the film by Catalin Mitulescu that was chosen last year to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. This song and Salbatice (also written in Romanian) didn’t make it into the movie’s soundtrack, but will be featured in Romanza, a documentary that Pablo is editing that is a sort of trip diary told through song and images.

With the always impeccable Nacho Garcia and his keyboard, and the occasional trumpet, baritone and electric guitar, Malaurie, hugging onto his acoustic guitar, polished off a concert full of little gems. Behind him glittered Christmas lights. He played a number of songs from El Festival del Beso, his first soloist album, and also a lot of unedited songs, like Interferencias Totales. Meanwhile, a baby sitting in the first row (accompanied by a consenting parent, of course) stared at him with complete concentration, singing and smiling along with the music. During Carmencita not even the scratches of a knife and plate could be heard, just that voice that Malaurie finds so normal; but others, like the song Seymour Cassel (“he’s an American actor and I’m not going to tell the story”) the instruments exploded.

After Vení, the queen bee of alliteration, came Constelación Abductura, the last song on the set list, throwing melancholy to the side (at least for me) and inviting in a new energy. He wrote it to close the shows at last March´s La Gran Noche de Malaurie, it comes with a farewell bow, and may be part of the next album which is being recorded between trips, concerts and moves.

I take away a lot of strong impressions when listening to Malaurie´s music, almost none of them can be explained with a journalistic/technical vocabulary. But I can talk about the sensations I get. Of how a song builds slowly, almost at a creep, with small little elements (call them piano notes or a simple guitar strum or a whisper) that little by little come together and grow until they form this beautiful mass of sounds. Malaurie´s music is like a cosmos. Wow. I understand perfectly how they listen and understand him in Eastern Europe. His songs are hypnotic, melancholic, sweet. You look around and it looks like half the audience is in some sort of musical coma. Double wow.

Every Sunday Sonido Ambiente is planning Feliz Domingo, a series of concerts to fill your lazy Sunday with some of the best music from the underground scene. For more info, click here.