GURO MOE: MEXICO I LOVE
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Tales on favourite spots by our network of femxle musicians
GURO MOE
MEXICO I LOVE
Mexico, I miss you like water. I miss you like air. As the reflection of the version of me that I want to be. As streams of fire. The softness that melts me. The fear that shakes me.
It was a gift to be invited to Mexico for the first time in 2013 by Eric Namour to the festival El Nicho for a solo performance. But I wanted to bring the whole band of MoE so I wrote to Lasse Marhaug for contacts, as he has usually always been to the places we want to go.
This text works as a concentrate of the first meeting with Mexico. Since then it has been an ever growing relationship.
The way Mexico opened me was through eyes, mouth and heart.
Through my eyes.
Colors everywhere. All senses awakened. Smell of corn and chilli, hot, warm sweat, sound of mariachi, flowers with such intense colors that tell so strongly of a joy for life, for this presence, even inside the crumbly shadowy desert. Agave plantations viewed from a bus window or from the car. The landscape that let the mind connect with “the forever”.
There I was, like in an ambush of a presence so dense and intriguing, so inspiring, so fascinating that all I wanted was to absorb it all. To feel as much as I possibly could. As in every other tour but also differently from any other tour, because this time I felt I was allowed to feel this much and was being met with the same. I don’t know how to really describe that. I do feel I can remember this strange sensation of understanding. Humble, as it was an abstract sensation which had no words yet. And the eyes I met, who always wanted to understand. I recognised an equal gratitude and understanding about the fact that we are creating something, about being human beings altogether. In some sense, this confidence is all you have. As in a free fall, one leans one’s heart against another human’s heart. I cannot hide it and I felt I didn’t have to in Mexico. I can’t find the right words to explain it. It’s something I miss in Norway and I don’t quite know what it is.Description for this block. Use this space for describing your block. Any text will do. Description for this block. You can use this space for describing your bloc
Through my mouth.
Spices filled my whole body, everywhere. It is a taste I have come to be dependent on.
Since 2007 I had toured the US and Europe several times before this trip. Spending time in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Italy I gained a high tolerance and excitement towards spicy food. But nothing had been like this. It felt like coming to the main source. The spices’ tree of life.
In my many reflections on chilli, I wondered if it is always standing above everything. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just lifts the whole flavor into a new dimension, creating new meeting points between ingredients I thought I knew. And it lifts that presence, that unavoidable presence. That’s what I search for in everything. The deep joy created by every bit I ate burning in every cavity of my mouth . Without asking for it.
Salsa de arbol, de habanero. Salsa verde, pico de gallo. Chipotle. And blue corn tortillas with huitlacoche mushroom (a mushroom that grows on corn) and pumpkin flowers. Oh joy! Taco stands on street corners were the best. I was told more than once by the guys serving me food to be careful. I think my trustful eyes or searching presence made me look like an easy victim.
Through my heart.
It opened up.
I was introduced to how I wanted all life to be, as parallel creative processes.
Like the lady in the corner shop making green juice. After the blender had done its course, instead of washing it, she put some juice into it and, after swirling some rounds to use the whole of it, she poured it to the very top of my glass. The use of the ingredients. Creating as you go.
Or the time aspect. In the beginning I was entirely resigned to it: «It’s all improvisation! Nothing is certain! It changes for no reason, always!». Experiencing this same thing as it was an inspiration, I could see how it followed my creative process. I slowly understood that the reason why a plan had to be changed three times from the original one was because a better plan came out of it. That was tricky to accept and open up to for a precise – uptight – follow the plan- be on time – Norwegian. Having to listen to the surroundings. To have to change my plan based on them. Having to deal with change as a quality. I’ve learned that from Mexico.
At the beginning I also found it difficult to understand that pushing myself to the limit could result in an energy from the audience that I had never experienced before; and that our music could create such an energy that was as intense as, or more than, us! So in a way it was like leaning against this energy or leaning against each others’ energy, trusting that and finding new levels for executing that presence. It was fire.
I remember an episode in Tlaxcala. People were screaming «More feedback! More feedback!», but the owner switched off the electricity because someone from the government was in the bar and wanted to watch football. At a certain point when the crowd was screaming and sort of going mad, I looked at the amps we had gotten as if they were lunch boxes and thought: “You cannot react like this, our sound is shit!” So the energy can transform in several ways and it can transcend the mere physical sound. Boom to the heart.
Someone said that nothing in Mexico is to be taken seriously. On that first tour I remember the interviewer at Channel 11 telling that corruption was the premise of the country’s existence. If you tried out in an honest way you would fail. Somehow I felt that everything I built as truth could be a lie or could disappear.
So, I was confronted with a wide variety of topics about Mexico since the very first time I have visited.
I was also confronted with the violence towards women and in every tour thereafter I heard from friends that it has been increasing. Looking at it from the angle of my reality, women there had to survive in impossible situations. It has been painful to hear. I see so much feminine energies in Mexico’s existence. It feels like they are choking their whole existence.
Mexico made me aware of a different reality. And also of the presence of death. When I came back from this first tour I got this feeling that, here in the north, we are so afraid of death that we are even more afraid to live.
Notion of direction.
Mexico is so much all the time: sound, motion, spice. An intense presence that calms me. From knowing almost nothing about where I wanted to go with my music, I searched towards it outside of myself. A voice, an image or energy. I felt I had no technique, just this energy. It was made visible when I met Mexico.
Bass player, vocalist and composer Guro Skumsnes Moe has toured continuously since 2006 with her main projects, MoE and Sult, in Europe, the US, Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia, China and Mexico. Her production includes over 40 recordings, music to several plays for Plexus Polaire Compagnie, the score for Amat Escalantes “The Untamed” together with Lasse Marhaug and composing for the chamber orchestra The Touchables together with Kari Rønnekleiv and Ole-Henrik Moe. Moe runs the label Conrad Sound together with Håvard Skaset and did co-curate the all Ears festival for 10 years.