ALMANACS
An interview with Wilmer Murillo of Almanacs on music as therapy, taking inspiration from the Honduran landscape, and his Mystery Circles cassette release, Manglares
- Conducted via video chat by Alex Muscat -
Mystery Circles: To start, I wanted to learn more about your background. I know you’re also a designer. How did you get into that work and when did you start making music?
Almanacs: Everything started around 2008 when I was 18 years old. I started making digital paintings, which is how I got into illustration. During that period, I also had a creative life around music. At the time, I was playing drums at a church, and I found that I had a good ear even though I never had formal training. I was formally trained in the fields of design and art, but never music. One day I just grabbed a drum and started playing with it and realized that I could follow a song. In the following years, I was more focused on design and illustration and I had the chance to exhibit my work in some galleries. Over time, I started to have more curiosity for electronic music. In 2012, I started my first electronic music project, called Lunar Bear. It was more like synthwave or synthpop. Now that I listen back to it, I think it sounds terrible, but I learned a lot with that project and it was really fun. However, I always wanted to make my design match my music. After a couple years, I figured out that project wasn’t reflecting my visual style, so I started to experiment with new genres of music. That’s how I ended up doing Almanacs. I wanted to create something more abstract, something that matched my visual imagination, something that is not really in a specific genre. It could be called ambient, but, if you listen to my music, sometimes it doesn’t follow what you’d expect from ambient music.
MC: It’s also not the style of music people may expect to come out of Honduras. How did you arrive on this style, and how is it different from the other music you see coming out of Central America?
A: Actually, there’s another reason why I shifted into a calmer style, something closer to ambient. While I was studying abroad (I got my masters degree in Taiwan) I started to suffer from anxiety and depression. This led to suffering from epilepsy, so it was a really hard time for me. I was still doing music with my previous project, but I felt the need to slow down my head and conquer my mind. Epilepsy was a really hard struggle. I started to get deeper into music like Loscil and Tim Hecker, the biggest minds in ambient music. I really enjoyed listening to this music and it made me feel good. I could feel my brain vibrate slower when I listened to these artists. So I said, hey, I should try experimenting with something like this – with no drums, no rhythm, no specific structure. Just slow music with synthesizers and see where it takes me. So that’s another part of the story of how Almanacs started as a project. Regarding Honduran music, it’s an interesting journey because Latin America is famous for merengue, reggaeton, all of this dancey, happy music. When I started making ambient music, most people just didn’t understand it. When I started playing my synthesizers, even my family didn’t have the attention span to listen to my music. It’s not normal in the culture to hear music without a rhythm. Because of this, it has been a challenge to find places to play live and to find a local audience. At the same time, I have found people that actually like this type of music and follow my work and listen to it. It’s a small audience, but it exists. It’s very motivating to find people who listen to your music somewhere you wouldn’t expect.
MC: How have you seen your work develop across the Almanacs project?
A: I was really excited for Mystery Circles to release this cassette. It’s sort of a dream come true, because when I started with Almanacs it was therapy for my epilepsy. Having a cassette released by a label a couple years later is pretty exciting.
MC: Focusing on Manglares, I noticed that many of the track titles refer to plants or nature. How do you see these natural elements inspiring your music?
A: I would say that most of my music takes inspiration from Honduran nature. Our country is small, but we have beautiful natural locations. If you ever want to come, I can take you! We have mountains, but we also have the beach. I don’t often travel to the outdoors, but every time I do, it feels good and I come back with fresh ideas for my music. For my tracks, I like to listen to them and imagine places and landscapes. Whatever landscape I imagine becomes the name of the track. I recorded Manglares after a trip I took to the north of the country. In that area, there are a lot of mangroves, which is manglares in Spanish.
MC: I think you do get a sense of those peaceful landscapes while listening to the album. I also wanted to learn a little more about your collective Templo Animal. What are you trying to achieve through this collective?
A: We started as a Facebook group. We were just people making music on Instagram and Facebook and we started to contact each other. We sent resources to talk about music and share our work. We became online friends, a small community. We eventually found out we had a lot of things in common: we were all Latin American, and, even though we don’t fall into exactly the same genre or style, we were all interested in doing something experimental, like experimental trap, or ambient, etc. In the end, we’re all just doing weird things with electronic instruments.
So after 1 or 2 years we said, hey we should do something else. I created a website with information about us and we released our first compilation. Our plan is to eventually create a physical release, but we’re trying to take it slowly and do it right. Our priority is to stay together and promote our music. It feels good to be in a community of people with similar mindsets.
MC: I’m curious to hear about other influences on your work, either from visual art or from musical artists.
A: At the beginning, I listened to a lot of Tycho. I saw them live once, and it was a big inspiration for me. I listen to Alessandro Cortini, Emily Sprague, Oneohtrix Point Never. Also a Japanese artist, Chihei Hatakeyama. Basically I listen to most of the ambient music I can find. I also listen a lot to the other artists on Templo Animal. I feel so inspired when I listen to them. For visual art, I like the work of Alessandro Mendini. He’s an italian product designer. But, when I’m creating, I try to reset my brain a bit in order to not copy others. I try to follow my own instincts and find my own voice.
MC: Building off of that, could you describe your artistic process? Are there particular pieces of gear or software that support your practice?
A: For every album, I have a different process. Actually, you could look at each album I’ve released as a compilation of experiments I’ve done using a specific process. My main tools are the Korg Monologue and Behringer Neutron. Those are my two analog synthesizers. I’m looking for a polyphonic synthesizer in the near future, because right now I only have these monophonic ones. I also have some Korg Volcas and effect pedals. I record everything to Ableton Live, but recently I’ve been using this software called Voltage Modular. It’s similar to VCV Rack or Reaktor. It’s a virtual modular synthesizer, and it’s a powerful tool. I like to use it to program generative sequences that I send to my analog synthesizers. I don’t have a Eurorack with generative modules to make these sequences, so I go to Voltage Modular, program them, and then use my hardware synthesizers to take these generative sequences and record them back into Ableton or my recorder. Everything is processed through my effect pedals.
Sometimes, when I need polyphony I go to Voltage Modular or Izotope Iris. It’s a spectral synthesizer that processes samples, either from my analog synthesizers or from homemade objects like a piece of wood or plastic. I combine these samples in Izotope Iris and take small frequencies from the spectrum to create a new sound out of it. I love it, and it’s an important tool in my process. Most of my polyphonic pads and soundscapes come from it. I don’t like to have too much gear. Whether it’s software or hardware I only try to focus on 2 or 3 tools and master those tools and get to know them in depth. I like to play with VCV Rack, but I find it too complicated for actual production. I don’t like how it plays with Ableton or hardware. It’s useful for experimentation, but, for recording, I use the other tools I mentioned before.
MC: That process also seems very specific to this age in electronic music, where digital and analog are very interchangeable and can coexist.
A: I don’t like the vision of going fully DAWless or fully analog. I think both can be combined together to get the best of both worlds. I love analog sound, but digital programming and digital effects and tools can be a good complement to analog. You can combine them and get interesting results.
Also, being in Honduras, buying gear is pretty expensive here. It’s a real luxury to create a full studio with a lot of expensive hardware. It’s something that’s hard to achieve, so you have to learn to master your own small tools. I think that it’s actually pretty fun because some people ask me how can you get that beautiful sound out of a Volca or out of a Monologue, but they’re my only tools so i’ve learned to master them. Maybe if I had ten $1000 synthesizers I wouldn’t get to know them too well, since there would be too many tools to learn completely. I like to be limited and only have a few things that I can really get to know and master.