I am waiting in an empty café for Federico Escofet, a.k.a Feco, a.k.a Mussa Phelps. I want to talk to him about something known as ‘Asterisco’. But I’m not really sure what Asterisco is.
I have ascertained this much: that “Asterisco is a community of independent artists that develop music, art, and photography”, courtesy of Asterisco.org, but, apart from lots of arty links to lots of arty people, I’m not really getting much else on Asterisco, per se.
What is Asterisco?
Feco deliberates, as if he’s choosing his words carefully, and then tells me that he doesn’t really know. I leave a few seconds hanging for him to pursue his train of thought. I’m think I’m in trouble here if the man I’m interviewing about Asterisco can’t actually tell me what it is.
Yet after a few difficult opening minutes, I suddenly realise that Feco is more shy than taciturn, and once he begins to open up information just pours out of him.
It transpires that Asterisco is an ‘open community’, made up of artists that seem to weave in and out of each other’s lives. They are a group of friends, and friends of friends, sometimes even strangers. The concept is, as Feco puts it, somewhat “chaotic”; there is no boss. Established around seven years ago, Asterisco is more a ‘mentality’ than an organisation.
To this end Asterisco is about collaboration. If you’re a painter, you can call on a musician, if you’re a musician, you can call on a photographer. Asterisco is like a “family”, and it’s because they like it. They’re all willing to make the effort, although “many of the guys in the community are the same; we are all bad at communicating, I’m bad at communicating what I do.”
So, what is it that Feco actually does?
“I create,” he says vaguely. When he expands it turns out that he’s primarily a musician, but also a designer of furniture, a cook, and latterly, a very keen gardener.
Feco tells me “making music takes a lot of energy. Gardening is a lot easier”.
The words ‘community’ and ‘family’ have cropped up enough to grab my attention. Asterisco are evidently close knit. “I consider them companions in my life. Sometimes we don’t see each other for months, but we know that we’ll still be friends even if we don’t speak for a year.”
One of the troup, photographer Nico Ferrando, is now living in the Middle East. At first, five years ago, he was an “outsider” to the community. Now he is like a “brother”.
Feco notes, “we are not an enterprise. You are free to enter the community, and if you want to, you will get a lot from us, as we will get a lot from you.”
Is Asterisco a comment on not being a sell out?
“We don’t want to publicise because we don’t want people calling us up wanting to hire us, using us for what we do. We don’t have any copyright, but people are free to play music publicly, use our pictures, for sure. I mean, if they’re going to be making a huge amount of money out of work, then it’s like ‘call me’, you know?”
So one could say that Asterisco is a brotherhood, they help each other. Creatively, and constructively, and not without criticism. Everyone who is part of Asterisco mutually admire what the other is doing. They are not concerned whether or not what they do will sell.
Mussa Phelps
Latterly, Feco has been working on a new album, ‘Now here/Nowhere’, which has taken him three years to record. The first year and a half was spent simply recording music. Here he called on his friends in the Asterisco community, for help and criticism alike.
The new album, which is a clever play on words, emanated from nothing more than his efforts to organise his music. (Over some thousand records). Trying to organise his records by style, he suddenly found himself stuck when he couldn’t locate a specific style of music. He says that he wanted to work out the elements of electronic music, but without the “clichés”.
“In traditional music, it’s about composition, followed by execution. In jazz, for example, composition and the execution come at the same time. With electronic music, composition can come after the execution. With electronic music we are putting samples together after they’ve been written.”
What’s the deal with the Mussa Phelps pseudonym?
“It started as a joke. I was performing a show in San Martín, and I just got introduced to the audience as Mussa Phelps, which had been an in joke, and it’s just stuck.”
He delves deeper into the etymology of the frankly bizarre name. “I went to Egypt, and the taxis there are crazy. You have strangers jumping in with you every which way. And none of the meters work. Anyway, we took this one cab, and the meter was working. And it was so cheap! At the end of the ride we told him, ‘you know, so many people rip you off, and you haven’t. So thank you.’
“And then the taxi driver told us his name was Mussa. He said, it’s like Moses, Biblical. He said, ‘I can’t lie.’”
So his pseudonym derives from an Egyptian taxi driver with a penchant for integrity. And Phelps is after the Mission Impossible character. I consider this; fact and fiction, truth and impossibility. Feco seems preoccupied with opposition.
Indeed, he goes onto explain that ‘Now here/Nowhere’ is about opposing concepts. It’s about changing from one state to another in a split second. From being completely focussed to just ‘floating in space’.
“The name is to put a reminder that you have to be now, here, all the time, and to recognise that when you feel like you’re nowhere, it takes a click of two fingers, to get back to where you were.
“There are no missing parts. Everything is right here, right now. We just have to relax and find a way.”
Time drawing to an end, Feco has to get to a gardening lesson. (With “lots of old ladies and a very patronising teacher”). His philosophy has left me bizarrely enlightened. Don’t look too hard, create and let be.
Asterisco seems to be a hotbed of pure, unabided talent, and I implore you to look them up. Maybe you can enter the brotherhood; who knows.
To discover Asterisco, go to www.asterisco.org. To discover Mussa Phelps, go to www.myspace.com/mussaphelps