Natália Mallo – The collector of sounds
The music is an excuse for a journey, the cuisine a pretext to write. Born in Argentina, resident in Brazil and always on the move, Natália Mallo recently spent time in Portugal.
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It happens. We look at a face, hear a name and when we start talking we discover we are in the presence of various people. Natália Mallo is just such a person. Our appointment is at the Hotel Bairro Alto bar, during a break from a gastronomic marathon on Portuguese soil. There is no time to lose. Soon, Natália Mallo has to catch a taxi to have lunch at Chef Vítor Sobral’s new restaurant. Recently, it has been all stomach, with little attention to the head and the heart.
The first impressions don’t clarify much. What will it be? Tango singer or pop music star? Buenos Aires or São Paulo? “How’s it going” or “Everything’s cool”? Avant-garde tropicalismo or the charm of the old continent? Composer or cook? Sound designer or blogger? Five-star hotel or friend’s couch? Little girl or woman?
There are no satisfactory replies, just a story to tell. The background: an itinerant life. Natália Mallo was born in 1974 in Buenos Aires. Her first trip was aged six, crossing Argentina from north to south to Patagonia. An overwhelming distance by car, alone with her father, while her two older brothers followed by plane. “My parents’ divorce had been a little difficult and he offered us this adventure as compensation. It became a very strong memory.” Memories of fishing for trout, exploring woods, cutting off lizards’ tails, drinking water from lakes while swimming.
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Her father, Ernesto Mallo, novelist, infected her with the travel bug, as a principle to live by. When he was home, Mallo always had music playing. Apart from the era’s panoply of pop, with the Beatles out front, the voice of Maria Bethânia was compulsory. There was one special record: Mel. “I was little and sang it all, word for word, without even knowing Portuguese.” By setting the needle in the groove at 33rpm, the father infected the daughter with the pleasure of music. She enrolled at the Conservatory in Buenos Aires – classical guitar lessons. “My guitar came from a factory next to my house. I went there every day to see it being made”, she says.
She had learned to read at three, the guinea pig and proof that a reading method invented by her mother – a Spanish teacher – worked. At college, Natália studied journalism like someone serving a prison sentence, until she thought better of it and gave up. She had a short-lived career as a bar singer, accompanied by the clink of glasses, only partially visible through the tobacco smoke and an inattentive audience, Brazilian guitar music in the days when people listened to Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Djavan and Paralamas do Sucesso. Not a fate you would wish on anyone.
Opportunity knocked at just the right time. A girlfriend living in São Paulo said she had a spot for her in the Brazilian mega-metropolis. The centre of Brazil, already full to bursting with 19 million inhabitants, received her with open arms. “And everything just flowed.” She found the right neighbourhood, the right class, in the middle of the São Paulo 1990s music scene, met Chico César and was introduced to Zeca Baleiro. It was then that Natália dived straight into a musical career: she formed Trash Pour 4, the tango group gatoNegro and released her solo album Qualquer Lugar.
In Brazil 14 years ago, Natália Mallo says that when she started feeling the itch to go travelling, she decided she would work on artistic projects all over the world. She has put sound to sculptures, done sound design for exhibitions, soundtracks for ballet and theatre. Europe has been a revelation. A self-revelation: “Coming here is like visiting my great-grandmother. In Spain I understood Argentina. In Portugal I understood Brazil. When you understand the essence, you accept it better”.
She passed through the Old Continent with the Portuguese version of the Gallimard Guidebook under her arm. But only the maps and the restaurant pages interested her. She says she is an uncompromising tourist. She travels incessantly. When the city allows it, she cycles. Berlin and Manhattan are the occasional cyclist’s dream. Forget Lisbon’s seven hills. She doesn’t enter churches, but explores supermarket shelves as someone would appreciate a Baroque altar. The design of the packets, the local products, the flavours of yoghurt, the fish counter: “Japanese shops are a mystery because you don’t know if you are buying a tube of soft cheese or toothpaste. In the USA, the organic products are an obsession. Sainsbury’s in London is so amazing I’ve spent hours buying a half a dozen items. And you put the things through the till yourself, nobody checks your honesty”.
At the chapter on religious shrines, she made an exception for the Chapel of Bones in Évora, and came out impressed. “It was cool how the monks reminded people how short life is”, she comments. As for Japanese mysteries, she remembers the visit to a restaurant that served cock combs and small raw squid. Live. “You had to kill them with your teeth before swallowing. For me it was the first and last time.” Her tourist guide at the time was Maki Nomya, vocalist with Pizzicato Five, who Natália met when she was doing shows with the project “Brazil Pop Culture Now”.
She doesn’t always carry a camera with her when travelling, but she always has a small digital recorder. She is a collector of sounds. In Lisbon she collected the persistent hiss of the trams, people’s café conversations, the deafening silence in the Chiado Museum. “I recorded the noises in a city shopping centre. You can’t understand anything that’s being said, but there is a murmuring which is different from the sound of a shopping centre in São Paulo”. She samples these textures, mixes them and uses them in her music.
In her sonic geography, she has never found anything quite like the vitality of the New York subway. “It’s an encyclopaedia of live world music.” At just one station she found a classical guitarist, followed by a African balafon player and a jazz trumpeter. A quick and cheap trip round the world.
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by Manuela Carona
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