Dutch artists Parallelle help to preserve musical cultures around the world through their audio visual project ‘A Day In’.
Amsterdam based duo Parallelle embark on a sonic adventure, transforming some of the world’s most vibrant and interesting cultures into musical compositions.
For their latest project ‘A Day In’, Parrallelle have travelled to various destinations around the world to share and preserve the indigenous musical heritage of the places they visit. The stunning Audio-Visual series is an extension of their previous ‘A Day At’ series and follows the duo to places such as Java, Osaka, Essaouira, and more, as they explore, record and create music with the locals.
In this interview, the brothers walk us through their experiences working with the local musicians, their favourite memories of the project, and the preservation of indigenous music.
What inspired you to start this project?
For our first album A Day At, we translated different places into musical pieces. A factory, a dental office, a kitchen, a ski station were our musical playgrounds. After that, our curiosity for sound went further as we explored foreign countries and cultures we were fascinated about.
The idea was to translate a city and its sound into a piece of music, and push people to listen more. Once you focus on the sounds around you, you notice so many and feel so present. There are so many stories to be told through these sounds.
How do you select the places you visit?
Choice comes from the country and culture we want to discover and where we have good connections. The most important thing for us is to feel like a local, so we will be more inclined to go to a place where we have local friends that can introduce us to the essence of the places we visit. Our Asian episodes were in collaboration with Marriott Bonvoy, and we chose the destinations to show the diversity of culture in Asia-Pacific.
Can you talk to us about the creative process behind the music?
Firstly, you need great recordings that can tell stories on their own and be used for our music. We like to categorize these recordings into atmospheric sound, rhythmical sounds, instruments, melodic, and surprising sounds. When we go on our sonic quests, we also like to cover the full frequency spectrum in recordings and have as many rhythmic sounds as possible.
When we create a drum kit for example, we need to cover every element such as kick, snare, toms, shakers, etc. After filtering our selections, warping, and creating clips of the recordings we like, the fun part starts, and we begin composing.
As you can imagine, each destination is sonically unique with its own instruments and rhythm. We also keep this as our reference to stay aligned with their culture. We usually keep the original drums pattern of a place and add extra rhythmic elements, to add extra groove and layers. We try to keep to the key and tonality of the musicians we collaborate with and add layers of synth, bass lines and chord progressions.
In the videos you play with local musicians. How do you make these collaborations happen, and how do the locals benefit from participating in these movies?
A lot of these encounters happened via friends or local contacts. We usually have months of research before we head to a destination.
By the time we arrive, we have already contacted musicians that have inspired us and are excited to collaborate.
Many of these encounters happened spontaneously through local interactions. We would explain our concept to people we meet, who would then lead us to musicians they know and love.
We have found that local musicians in these places are always excited to show their art and culture to a broader and foreign audience. Plus, they become collaborators of the track so that the music rights can be shared equally.
Can you share some of your favourite memories from the project?
The interactions with the musicians were definitely some of our favorite moments. Once we pass the language barrier and our jam flows smoothly, this is where it becomes interesting.
There was a time when we were jamming with TR Innovation, a band from Osaka. As we played together, we realised that something was off and the musicians were just trying to follow our electronic structure. One of them came to us using Google translate and asked if we wanted to try a Japanese tempo? We Increased it to 140 bpm and that changed everything! We went into such a dynamic trance, everyone adding some improvisations. that was quite something!
Where else are you planning to visit?
The world is big. There are so many places we would like to explore. If we have to pick three cultures, the Amazon with the Yanomami Tribe would be on top of the list. They are endangered and have so much knowledge that needs to be highlighted. Mongolia with the Kazakhs’s eagles hunters in the Altai Mountains. And finally, Zambia and the rhythmical Lozi culture.
Are there any ways that people can contribute to the preservation of cultures featured in the series?
We are actively looking for partnership with local associations. We already collaborate with a few local tourism offices to help some villages we visited. And we are working on creating a fund for culture preservation. We are open for any collaboration with people from this field. Anyone reading this that can help us, please reach out.