I had the great pleasure recently of interviewing João Branco Kyron from Portugal’s excellent Beautify Junkyards. Their lovely new album Cosmorama comes out in less than a week on 15 January. This interview was conducted over email and I got some great, thoughtful answers from João. Thanks again for this opportunity.
EK: Please tell us how the band formed.
JBK: Some of the members of BJ came from a band called Hipnótica (that released 5 albums between 1999 and 2010). We started playing covers of songs we loved (mostly from the Autumn Folk period), just for our own pleasure. Things evolved and suddenly we had enough songs for an album that we thought it was worth to release, and that’s when we decided to release it under Beautify Junkyards. It was an unusual way to start a band with a debut album made entirely of cover versions, but all of them had a sense of unity soundwise speaking.
EK: What have been your biggest influences, not just in music, but in art and literature too?
JBK: We are always absorbing new artistic expressions and sometimes we find some artists/works that we feel a strong affinity with, to the point of trying to incorporate some of their elements in our own musical and lyrical language. Things change through time but there are artists that are constantly present on our minds, for instance: Os Mutantes, Glauber Rocha, Incredible String Band, Derek Jarman, Czech New Wave cinema, Broadcast, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, United States of America, Zeca Afonso, Fernando Pessoa, Banda do Casaco, Ash Ra Tempel, just to mention a few. For this new album, we also searched in more depth the visionary works of Austin Osman Spare and Vali Myers.
EK: How integrated is Portuguese culture in your recordings?
JBK: Many aspects of the Portuguese culture are part of our musical identity, but the access to some of the more recent recorded material was not an easy task but for the existence of YouTube (thats works as our collective memory). During 40 years, Portugal was under a dictatorship, so everything from abroad was filtered through the regime lenses. During that period, many artists had to exile and others faced difficult times. With the Carnation Revolution in ‘74 came an “explosion” for the senses in all the artistic fields. Then in the 80s, we had a boom of local rock bands, and nowadays I think Portugal is one of the most exciting places in Europe in terms of music creation. We love to mix our Portuguese influences and also our language in the band´s music, it’s that fusion of influences and languages that make it unique. On our live sets, we also usually play covers from artists we admire like Zeca Afonso and Fausto, and we have plans to invite some of those artists to play with us.
EK: How did you cultivate your current sound? You play a unique blend of tropicalia, dream pop, and folk. Your songs are like wandering inside a dreamscape.
JBK: It’s not a conscious process, most of the base ideas for songs come from improvised sessions that are later worked in the studio. I think all of the influences I´ve mentioned and the fact that they are from different latitudes allows us to create music with many layers. There are some aspects we invest a lot of time on: the sonic textures and the instruments that better serve each song, sampling sounds from multiple sources and times and working on the lyrics.
From: https://bigtakeover.com/interviews/AVirtualConversationwithJoaoBrancoKyronofBeautifyJunkyards
