Interviews

A Quick Chat With Seward

• 25th Sep 2015

Welcome to the weird and sideways world of Seward from Barcelona, Spain. Specialising in unusual and wonderful noises, their improvisational leanings mean no two gigs are the same and audiences get something completely unique each time they see them. They call the music they make ‘Freesong’ and we caught up with them to find out more about their intriguing approach to the writing process and what makes them tick.

When we first started playing music…
No one clapped after the first song. The whole audience gave us an honorable, sharp and grateful silence. Some of them confessed afterwards: “We were in shock… We didn’t know how to act because we didn’t want to be disrespectful with the music and its moment…and we won’t ever forget that concert because it was more than magical.”

If we had to choose a new name for the band it would be…
CARTUCHO because Seward is – on many occasions – a fully loaded firearm cartridge, always ready to shoot, and because its sound as a word is really powerful in Spanish: “¡Cartucho, Cartucho, Cartucho!”

We knew we were on to something when…
We did our first three shows on a roll. They were in the same week, back in January 2010, and suddenly we found ourselves together on the stage, falling into every single piece of music, rediscovering ourselves as musicians, finding old images of familiar ghosts on the pictures taken at the shows. All the audiences, the press and the industry agreed with us at the very first steps and we all knew we were finally together, completely happy, on the right path to find something great, pure and unique.

Our biggest non-musical influences is…
Life itself: The people we lost, the people we have on our side, the people we walk with, the unknown too and the ones to come, also our many faced and non-faced enemies. Hundreds of books of poetry and many other incredible and different authors, the bravery of science and philosophy, the astonishing freedom of contemporary dance, the history of our history, never to forget. Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, Byung Chul-Han, Slavoj Zizek… And food, of course, as one main long table of joy where we get together every single day.

We’re most proud of…
Our audience and their beloved courage.

Something we haven’t achieved yet which we’d like to is…
To find the right partners to build a new music industry based on a creative, fair and balanced humanist economic model, new ways of performing and enjoying festivals, tours and shows, and a true challenging experience and compromise as artists in the beginning of the 21st Century.

We’re not ashamed to admit that…
Seward face the future for the common good and play by their own rules in its present time, defending a new way of understanding music in the rotten times we live, far away from repeating the patterns created in the past decades and also inspired by them. Seward exist with the others, knowing nothing, discovering new truths, face to face, slowly, very slowly, as knowledge develops itself in our brains, getting away of the digital machinery. Seward do not have presence on the social media and fight for keeping focused on their music only, and their audience remains completely responsible of it the same way they do. Artists, journalists, photographers, musicians, editors, writers…the internet has stolen our professions away, cut off its value and taken our political power away. We must create new ways of making things possible for the brand new arts coming, breaking up radically and positively with the constant and usual lack of manners of the free-costs based cultural system we’re all in.

If we could wave a magic wand and make anything in the world happen it would be…
Magic does exist for all of us, maybe too far away from us sometimes, and you will experience it if you come to Seward if you’re ready for it, but…do we need to answer this question really? I think you all know the answer: Well, let’s just play this game where the word justice is not even needed in our vocabulary.

Someone you might not have heard of that you should check out…
Once again… You? What about you?

UK Live Dates:

Wednesday 30th September @ Proud Camden, London
Thursday 1st October @ The Macbeth, London