Getting to Know… Daymoon | Interview

In the 509^th Q&A in our Getting to Know… series, we get the inside scoop from the Portuguese trans-musical non-dance combo Daymoon.

Oh, do you, Daymoon? Rock on! Adding to the colorful response to our first burning question, the band adds, “Get ready for a plethora of un-rockish instruments, as well as lyrics and topics that you mightn’t have expected either.” Ooh-wee! We get the inside scoop on the Portuguese trans-musical non-dance combo’s genesis, goals, musical influences, and current and future musical endeavors. So, without further ado, let’s jump right into Getting to Know… Daymoon: Interview No. 509!

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For those who may not be familiar with you, what would you say makes you distinct or unique? How do you rock the audience’s socks off?

We rock those socks off very gently by massaging their feet with guaranteed drum-less music. Other than that, I’d say ‘get ready for the unexpected – just when you think you’ve nailed our style, we toss that nail into something completely different.’ Also, get ready for a plethora of un-rockish instruments, as well as lyrics and topics that you mightn’t have expected either.

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Okay, let’s explore some juicy backstories. How did Daymoon form, and what were some of your goals or visions early on?

The band definitely started with me [Fred] – I was born in Germany, but have lived in Sintra, Portugal since 1980. I entered the Portuguese music scene surreptitiously in 1984 with a local band called Dead Landscape, which eventually disbanded after a couple of fruitless years, as our kind of somewhat more complex music was not really in sync with the taste of the time in 80s Portugal. So, while my fellow musicians all moved into more commercial, 80s-fit music, I started a private endeavour called ‘Daymoon’ and began recording in my home studio, a bad habit that I kept up for many years, while also playing baroque music with a neighbour of mine. I ended up recording four poorly recorded demo albums, which never got released. I also wrote and recorded a fifth, concept-based album called ‘Fabric of Space Divine,’ with a bunch of musicians from the US and the UK, plus a few musicians from Portugal. (The album was re-recorded properly many years later and eventually released). In 2008, a live version of Daymoon eventually congealed to perform on stage, among others, at the widely regarded Gouveia Art Rock festival in 2009, and record our first ever proper band-cum-studio album, All Tomorrows. And then my wife died in 2011 from cancer, and I retired from music altogether for a while. Sometime later, I returned to work in the studio and eventually built a new band, with half the members from Portugal and the other half from other countries. Going through different incarnations over the years, we have recorded and released five studio albums, and my own role in the band has shifted slowly from being the main composer to being somewhat of a curator: I provide most of the lyrics plus a loosely-knit framework for the other band members to navigate in freely, while still keeping an own band identity.

My goal for Daymoon hasn’t changed at all from the very beginning. One day, in 1982 or so, Beto, the drummer of my then band Dead Landscape (he worked and still works with many well-known rock and pop bands in Portugal) asked me after band rehearsal: ‘Fred, why on earth do you make this weird kind of music? No one’s ever going to buy that!’ – ‘You know, Beto, what I want to is give people a secret friend that they can spend time with their headphones on, when they have nobody else.’

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Let’s talk more about goals.  Have your goals or perspectives changed since you first started? What do your aspirations or goals look like now?

Obviously, when we started out as a band, we dreamed big. Like, sign up with a major prog label, like Inside Out. Or even a minor – but more interesting – one, like Cuneiform. One of our running gags in the studio was ‘Fuck you, Mr Wilson – we’ll do better!’ However, later, as an interpreter at Portugal’s biggest annual prog festival, Gouveia Art Rock, I met many successful prog musicians personally over the years, and all those long talks with them eventually changed my outlook. Nowadays, I’m happy if we can get our music ‘out there’ at all, and I’m really proud if we can say that our music is idiosyncratic. One thing that put me off particularly was seeing all my favourite bands going through the same rut: record an album and then tour to promote and sell the album. And then record the next album, and tour again. And so forth. And don’t change your style so as to keep your fans loyal. We once had a US prog act, Bent Knee, at our home for a few days, while they were touring Europe, and they made it very clear to me that this is not what I was aiming for. On the other hand, our woodwind and reeds player Paulo Chagas, who is well known in the improvised music scene, once said to me: ‘I never play for money, that would be prostitution!’ So, there you have it.

My goal these days is simply hoping that the band and I can make another album, and with some luck, get it out there. I must say, having found OOB Records was a giant lucky stroke on this way!

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Everybody is influenced by somebody else. Who would you consider some of your biggest musical influences, and how are they influential?

When I was a teenager, in my ‘formative years’, I was a major fan of Queen (up to Day at the Races, of course), Klaatu, Pete Sinfield, Triumvirat, and Cat Stevens, but I don’t think any of this shows in my music – except obviously on the opening track of Wednesday, and that’s on purpose. Other than that, no prog there. No Genesis, no ELP, no Yes, none of that. Baroque music was and still is a major source of joy for me, but once again, I don’t think it shines through much in my music. Clout me in the ear if I ever write a fugue! Anyways, around 2000, the early ‘3^rd prog wave,’ such as Spock’s Beard and The Flower Kings, hit me unexpectedly! I absorbed basically everything in that vein, including neo-prog acts like Pendragon, IQ, and so on. But then Gouveia Art Rock happened! The annual festival changed my musical life completely, and not only did I get to talk to lots and lots of well-known prog musicians in person, but I also started listening to more challenging music, such as Thinking Plague, Miriodor, and the intriguing likes. It was there that I also met three future daymoonians: Portuguese jazz musician Paulo Chagas, Italian trumpet player Luca Calabrese (also works with Swedish prog act, Isildurs Bane, has recorded with Richard Barbieri, and many others), and Swedish musicologist and guitarist Thomas Olsson, producer of Swedish proggers, Isildurs Bane.

Other than all that, there’s also the almighty Tigran Hamasyan, and then there’s one particular prog album that inspired me massively in the recent past: the gorgeously composed and performed Patience by French genius Clément Belio.

But since around 2016, my one and only inspiration and influence has been my fellow musicians in Daymoon. It is for them that I write, and it is they whom I listen to almost exclusively.

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Ah, the fun stuff.  What’s your craziest tour story or the wackiest thing that’s happened during a performance?  Feel free to be creative.

We only performed live a handful of times, but our first gig was the toughest for me. It was at a side project of the Gouveia Art Rock festival, called ‘GoProg’, and we were the opening act. We were the last to do the sound-check, so the stage was all set for us when we arrived. The audience lights went out, the announcer announced us, and out we dashed onto the stage. My setup for the first song was a microphone, an acoustic guitar on a strap around my neck, a flute on a stand, and an electric Fender guitar held in a special stand. The first three minutes of the song consisted of me playing the acoustic guitar, singing, and playing the flute, plus, of course, the band. And all went well until that particular part where the band stops, and I’m by myself playing a guitar riff on the Fender Strat. Except, when I hit the first note on the Strat’s A string, it goes ‘booooooing,’ and I see two of the strings hanging down limply in a deep curve! My mind went blank. The band waited for me to play the riff. Nothing happened for 30 or so seconds. I froze. The whole band froze. The audience froze. And no one in the audience noticed the hanging strings. And then, Adriano, one of our youngest band members, playing percussion and clarinet, suddenly started a frantic dance, playing the percussion, waving for us to join in. The band did. While I waved to a musician friend in the audience and asked him from the stage to tune the Strat for me. The whole band now went into a rather entertaining Latin-inspired but decidedly un-proggy groove improv for a few minutes, and after I got back my Strat, our show finally resumed as planned. Our keyboarder, though, never recovered and went into a massive bout of stage fright that lasted throughout the entire show.

The funny thing is that at no point did I realize that I could simply have played the solo guitar riff on the acoustic guitar around my neck!

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To this point in your career, what would you describe as your favorite song you’ve recorded or performed live? What makes that song special?

I can’t really pinpoint any favorite as our music is massively diverse, but as far as our latest album goes, it’s definitely “The Trees of the Mind Are Black”. And I love the rack so much because I did so very little on it: I provided the lyrics, based loosely on a poem by Sylvia Plath, as well as a sort of general structure with a few basic ideas, an explicit description of the mood, and the score for the initial bass clarinet riff, but everything else was done by the band, most of all Lavínia, who spent long days in the studio creating her own version of everything, with all those funky witchy vocals, and manipulating the recordings the other band members had done. Everyone simply shines on the track, and I think it’s the eeriest thing we’ve ever done.

If I were to suggest a little playlist from all our albums:

“The Sum” (from All Tomorrows)

“Middle” (from Fabric of Space Divine)

“Thyme” (from Cruz Quebrada)

“Pardon the Turkey” (from Erosion)

“The Trees of the Mind Are Black” (from Wednesday)

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Is there anything else awesome, cool, or left-of-center we should know about Daymoon? Secret talents or surprising tidbits?

Tidbits about the band members:

• Fred (Portugal): In my non-daymoon day job, I work as a linguist within the IT industry. My non-musical interests include cooking, foraging, and cosmology. Other than that, my life is all over our albums’ lyrics…
• Lavínia (Portugal): main lead singer since our previous album. Lavínia also works as a TV and stage artist and is a veritable force of nature! Her voice gave Daymoon the edge it was missing.
• Tiago (Portugal): Lavínia’s partner. TV and stage artist also works in the cinema business. The three of us love foraging together in the Sintra mountains. Tiago has a rather angelical voice, which he acquired when singing as a child in a convent choir.
• Paulo (Portugal): has played woodwind and reed instruments with us since well before the very beginning of Daymoon. In fact, we had a band before this, called Mispel Bellyful, but unfortunately, we only recorded one album together. Paulo is one of the organizers of Portugal’s largest improvised music festival, called ‘MIA’. Other than music, he has also published several books of prose and poetry, and cooks like a kitchen god! Paulo’s utterly unique way of playing and looking at music is the essence of the band’s trademark sound. He runs a label for improvised music (zpoluras.com) and has played on a long list of recordings with other artists.
• Jeff (USA): main lead singer on the first proper Daymoon album to be recorded, Fabric of Space Divine. Jeff is back in the band now as the lead keyboarder and has given our sound a distinctive, often very lyrical twist, but also with his at times very daring compositions.
• Thomas (Sweden): has played electric guitar with Daymoon since the very first album, initially on just a few tracks, up to eventually playing all electric guitars on the latest album. Thomas is a professor of musicology at the University of Lund. He has also been the producer of Swedish prog legends Isildurs Bane for many years. And more than anyone else, Thomas has shaped my understanding and appreciation of modern music.
• Luca (Italy): has played trumpet and flugelhorn with us since our first album. And like Paulo, his art has shaped our sound profoundly. I first met Luca at the Gouveia festival, where he was performing with Isildurs Bane. Later, I went to Sweden to attend the annual Isildurs Bane event, called ‘IB Expo,’ and we became friends on the spot, and bandmates soon after. Luca and I suffer from cardiac insufficiency, and we both carry a cardiac defibrillator implant. The track “The Arrhythmix” on our latest album is about the frankly terrifying experiences that we’ve been through with this shared affliction. Luca got hit much harder than I did, though. He has recorded with a plethora of famous artists, such as Richard Barbieri (Japan, Porcupine Tree, etc.) and numerous others.

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What is Daymoon currently working on or promoting that you can share? We love secrets, but there’s no pressure. 

I’ve begun work on an album with the working title Farewell to a Garden. That’s because we’re selling our house in Sintra to move a little further north, where there are no tourists. Sintra has become unbearable, and mass tourism has reached Venetian proportions. And with our house, we’ll also lose our beloved garden, which my wife created with love and tended to from her very heart for the past fifteen years. I only have some basic ideas for the album at this stage – e.g., an extended suite about the perhaps century-old plum tree, that died suddenly last year, an acoustic-guitar only track about the garden in summer, and a complex proggy thing about the recording studio, which is at the back of the garden. Overall, I guess the album will be gentler and more acoustic than anything before it, except the studio track, which might feature drums. But as with any Daymoon album, it’ll take a few years for it all to come together, and things may change along the way. Hopefully, perhaps, because that’s what I love most about making an album. In any case, I will have to rebuild most of my studio from scratch as it got irreparably damaged during the massive storms that hit Portugal for two months in a row earlier this year.

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Thank you so much for sharing and taking the time to answer these questions. Best of luck moving forward. 

Thank you for this opportunity!

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Getting to Know… Daymoon: Interview No. 509 [📷: Daymoon]

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