Mortal Combat As Leo Tolstoy said, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” That’s how London-based musician and composer Vincent Salgueiro’s conceptual EP ’Cartesia’ was created – a year-long project fitted into five tracks. But time doesn’t matter here. ’Cartesia’ proves that it can take a while to find your musical voice, and some things are worth the wait. Words: Gery Hristova Image: Margherita Allievi
Tell us a bit about yourself. “I work as a freelancer, making music for films and games. At first, I was making hip-hop-oriented music which was really strange hearing it now. But once I started studying here [at BIMM] everything came together and by the time I had to submit my [third year] final project, I got that musical voice.” How would you describe your music? “My music is self-dramatic and pensive, it’s not very happy and it combines electronic and acoustic sound.” What is your creative process like? “The thing is, I stopped making music and then I started over again. Sometimes I need time to get inspired before moving to the next project. Of course, I’m music production-based so everything revolves around my computer, but for this specific project, I wanted everything to be bespoke. I wanted everything to be originally made. There’s one track that samples have been bought, but other than that everything was recorded, sampled from scratch. So it was like painting – it started with a draft and you do the fine stuff after. That’s kind of where I found myself on a more avant-garde way instead of just being playing the guitar as I used to do. I find it quite fascinating how you don’t
need to play many instruments to create a great piece of music.” Could you tell us a bit about ‘Cartesia’? “Essentially, this was my final project here [at BIMM]. So I guess I developed and then produced it over the course of a year. I usually leave things open but with this project, everything was very defined in terms of narrative. With this project, I wanted to explore new techniques, how I can make music differently from the way I’ve been doing it before. So a lot of the tracks were based on new ways of trying to do music - I made a lot of tracks and then I narrowed them down. I had this big kind of narrative world that the project was living already before I started making any music. That’s why the first track is a prologue. It comes to a conclusion of itself. But the rest of the tracks lean more to each other. It’s a story, which could be quite abstract sometimes.” What’s the concept? “It’s all about the mind and the body, and how it connects in different situations. I thought it was quite poetic, but that’s not all. I got interested in the subject of mortality. If the mind and body are living separately what does happen to a mind when the body is dead? ‘Cartesia’ is a modern twist and approach to the topic. So the concept shifted to this: if
the mind and body are separate then what’s happening when we only exist online? Is it our mind separate from the body? Is this a real connection that I’m having with the people I’m talking to online?” If you had to create another album today what would you do differently? “‘Cartesia’ is driven by a strong concept and I want this for my next project too. I want to get inspired in the same way I did with my previous project. I did some research, I took everything I could find and I represented it in sound. My last album was inspired by religion and I’d love my next project to be something like ‘The Next Chapter’.” What’s next for you? “I hope I can continue making original music and maybe do some collaborations.” What is the best advice you’ve been given? “Without sounding corny, someone told me: “You know you can do anything if you want, right. Yes, you have to learn a lot of things but you can do whatever you want.” So I give the same advice to other people.” Find out more about Vincent at vincentsalgueiro.com, instagram.com/vincentsalgueiro and @vincesalgueiro on Twitter.
