Thoughts on Santiago Fradejas
I hesitated long before writing this. The main hesitation being my mediocre writing abilities and I wondered whether writing an article about my husband would be awkward, but until someone does it better, it after all seems appropriate that I, who has been watching Santiago making music for over eight years do so.
I found that one of the perfect cures or antidotes for a musician and anyone else to let go of the ego is meeting someone better than ourselves. It is liberation, nourishment, and enlightenment. Of course, one could choose instead to take the destructive sterile path of unhealthy competition, jealousy and remain in bitterness and mediocrity, but when we meet someone more crafted than ourselves, we can finally allow the ego to get out of the way and focus on the art only for the sake of the art, only for the sake of beauty! We suddenly approach music, art, or anything else, life itself with wonder. Life is greater than us. Music and art are a magnificent mystery. The fact that, as a species, we can create, and then, become aware that everything is creation, that thought never ceases to fill me with wonder and gratitude, gratitude for being saved from emptiness, boredom, and void.
Every day I have watched Santiago studying, reflecting on how he could create, design sounds, from start to finish of the sound, and I mean it. Even as I am writing this, I am trying to make sense of what I have witnessed for over eight years, I have watched him getting lost in the detail, the particle, and without seeing the finished result, I probably would have failed to see what he had been doing in the bigger picture. One of the results, and first, a selfish one, is that I have found not only inspiration for my work but substance for it too. His constant work on those sounds has created hidden files of sounds treasures, Pandora’s box we call it. In none of Santiago’s solo instrumental work, will you hear a preset, ready-made sound, in fact very often, what might be mistaken for a keyboard is electric guitar and hours of sounds which he designed with his pedals, and even on more recent occasions when a synth was used, that will also represent hours of research on designing sounds, or redesigning sounds, which also will trigger further researches on effect pedals.
Santiago never aims for the easy way of repeating himself, once he feels like, in his own words “has milked it too much”, he will trade his pedals for other pedals, spend more hours studying them, and designing new sounds and I am not even scratching the surface of it, mainly because I am not knowledgeable enough to elaborate on his processes so here we are talking about some aspects or facets of his instrumental path only, but there is much more to it. There is the composer, the vocalist, the harmonist, the poet, the artist. Recently, Santiago has been working on a magnificent solo project, made of vocal harmonies and his poetry written in Spanish. Those intricate harmonies work their magic, flowing between chromaticism, sometimes atonal, it will make you feel as if you were both in hell and heaven. When I say hell, there is nothing evil to it, it’s all the colours of the universe, life force working behind it. There is, of course, the man and his emotions, fears, uncertainty a human being can go through, and then there is the subconscious working or the soul, and I could hear that. I could hear the life force behind pushing him, probably unaware.
Some might call it channelling, whatever it is, it works its mystery. I often said to Santiago that he is both a Shaman and a Christian in the closet, which, I am sure, must either amuse him, puzzle him, or make his eyes roll. Santiago is an agnostic, not an atheist, but an agnostic. He loves the work of Saint Augustine, the literary value of the bible, the work of Piazzolla, he introduced me to Cecil Taylor and Alfred Schnittke who also turned my life upside down, and the list of who and what keeps Santiago animated is long and rich. He also has the curiosity to find out what the new generation has to offer, that statement might sound random but it is not, because let’s face it, many of us feel nostalgic about the past and bath in the illusion that everyone and everything was much better before, sometimes without really taking time to research further and we see the present art or music landscape as devoid of interest and doomed. Santiago approaches it with a fresh heart, a genuine curiosity, and hope.
Full discography both solo and collaborative can be found here https://santiagofradejas.bandcamp.com/
and https://laymaazur.bandcamp.com/
Special thanks to Will Kearney for the painting, his work can be found here https://www.facebook.com/sandsnowmanofficial/
June 5th, 2021 — Amandine M. Fradejas
