Outer Sounds 005 - March 2021
The selection for March 2021 is Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba LP reissue on Drag City. Plux Quba is such a mysterious, unique, timeless & singular album, we don’t know much about how it came into existence. After the fall of the Salazar regime in the mid 70s, a vital music scene started to bubble up in Portugal by the late 70s / early 80s as sounds and influences started trickling in and out of the country. Nuno Canavarro was on the outskirts of this new Portugal Rock scene producing records & playing in bands such as Delfins and Street Kids. But Nuno left the scene and headed to the Netherlands for a couple of years where he would study electronic music at the esteemed Institute of Sonology in Utrecht. He returned to Portugal brimming with ideas and inspiration. Armed with a very simple set up: an Ensoniq Mirage sampler (one of the first!) and a Fostex 8 track tape machine, he would go about constructing this intimate & personal musical landscape. He utilized some tricks and techniques he learned in the Netherlands but instead of applying them to more academic structures and sounds, he decided to work with more immediate sound sources from his environment and a handful of sampled instruments, modified and transformed into the playful sonic tapestry we hear on Plux Quba. Nuno premiered this new music at a musical contest/concert at the Instituto Franco-Português in the late 80s. João Peste was there to hear it and he loved the music immediately. He asked Nuno if he could release it on his label, Ama Romanta, which hadn’t really released any music like this before. (They would also release Toze Ferreira’s similarly fascinating Música De Baixa Fidelidade right around the same time). Ama Romanta pressed up 500 copies of the LP and while it was a well regarded album in the local music scene in Lisbon, it never made much of a splash beyond that. Fast forward to a few years later in 1991, Jim O’Rourke is hanging out in Koln with Christoph Heeman & the crew of Georg Odjik, Hans Jurgen, Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz & Ralph Dommert, etc. Christoph had gotten some copies of Plux Quba directly from Ama Romanta and he was selling & distributing them through DOM. Anyways, they all became quickly obsessed with this record. A few years later Jim would meet Rafael Toral and he would track down the original master tapes and digitize them for the CD/LP reissue on Jim’s Moikai label (a subsidiary of Drag City) in 1998. This reissue captured the attention of many more people & made it more widely available. It also fit in nicely with some of the current glitch, experimental, electronic music coming out at the time like Nobukazu Takemura (and other Japanese electronic music) as well as the Koln scene: Mouse on Mars, Microstoria & Oval. Plux Quba would continue to make waves and reverberations throughout various music scenes for many years to come. In 2015, Drag City repressed the LP (and made it available digitally) and again in 2021. It so important that this record is available for everyone to hear & I’m glad it has found its proper place in the world. It’s one of my favorite records of all time and I sincerely hope you enjoy it! Check out my conversation with Portuguese musician Rafael Toral about Plux Quba below!
