Flaaryr’s music has been hanging around the vast world of Bandcamp for a long, long time. That’s right. Guitar player-near crazy composer/improviser and looper Diego Manatrizio started all the madness in the Argentine duo Hungría circa 2014, and haven’t stopped since.
Despite the hiatus Hungría is currently found in, Flaaryr’s creativeness seems to be endless. After a couple LPs and Eps (which link you will find at the end of this note), the Reykjavik based virtuoso has released a 2-track EP called ‘micro-places’, by anomalía ediciones.
In his own words, ‘it is shaped by the habit of going for a walk without a clear destination as the first step of the creative process, and the experience of finding places on the way where there seems to shift its pace’.
The two tracks of this EP are built of layers of intertwined, displaced and phased loops where sharp melodic phrases, percussive patterns and atmospheric noisy clusters find space to interact while keeping the air in between. A hypnotic downward spiral to absolute peace of mind.
But let Flaaryr tell you more about this project and the EP.
How was Flaaryr conceived?
Flaaryr was born in 2018. By that time I was playing guitar in the subway. What I basically did was to hop in the train with my guitar, a looper and a tiny amp, and improvised anything in the moment. I took a lot of those improv ideas to start with the tracks for my first album. Every time I came up with something interesting, I recorded it on my phone as I waited for the next train to play in, and after that, I would come home and finish it.
Does the word Flaaryr mean anything special?
Flaaryr is a made up word, no meaning at all. I just typed up some random keys with my eyes closed until I found something which the sound I liked.
Tell me a bit about the creative process.
It all begins with improvisation. I record sessions that last for hours, then listen to them and I choose whatever ideas I like. After listening to all of these sessions, I try to replay the ideas, understand them, and then give them some rhythm and structure, until they can be repeated, looped. Then I can add layers, counterpoint, texture, noise and samples.
A very important part of this procees is to accept having mistakes ,and all the unexpected, and use all this as a starting point to explore all the stuff that can exist out of the learned patterns.
Playing “bad” intentionally, using your hands in deliberately uncomfortable positions, against the muscle memory that makes you repeat those patterns and scales that feel more familiar to actually learn what we can come up with from those technical errors.
What happened to Hungría, then? Is Flaaryr a side project?
Flaaryr started when Hungría was still active, we just stopped playing because I moved from Argentina to Iceland in 2019 and it’s not very functional to have a band living 5000 miles apart. But there is always the desire of getting back together, play again and create new music.
With the new ‘micro-places’ EP, what inspired you for it?
A hole in the ground with trees and complete stillness is something an elderly man told me in Þingvellir -an Icelandic national park- when I asked him about his favorite place in that area.
I found it beautiful from him to tell me that his favorite place of a rather spectacular, tourist place, was something as minimalist as a hole in the ground with trees and quietness. The inspiration for the music came from trying to put sound to what I felt being in said place.
Nice! Now, to wrap this up, what do you think about the evolution of the math rock scene in Argentina, and Latin America?
Well, since I left to Iceland I haven’t been able to go back to Argentina, so I’m not very familiar with all that is going on there. But I’m really happy every time I see what anomalía is working on and the new projects that are added. I’ve also seen that there is a closer connection between Latin American collectives from different countries. I think that is very important, it made me truly happy. I hope I can come back soon and participate of it.
You can give a listen to all of Flaaryr’s discography (and anomalía’s whole catalogue for that matter) on Bandcamp. I guarantee every second will be freaking worth it.