More about: Kety Fusco

Rage. Anger. Love. It would be interesting if we could bundle up every emotion that music had the potential to make us feel. Lust. Joy. Hate. In turn appreciating the way that noise and sound can combine and affect people in different ways. Healthy. Powerful. Shy. To truly understand how emotions are conveyed sonically thanks to nothing more than vibrations and the individuals that make them.

Albums and musicians tend to home in on a couple of these emotions, music itself coming together to offer listeners access to all of them, but on her new album ‘The Harp, Chapter 1’ Kety Fusco embodies a soundscape unlike anything heard in recent years. Her domination and control over the instrument grant the listener access to a broad range of different emotions, taking them on a sonic journey despite the albums relatively short run time.

“I started playing the harp when I was 6 years old,” she told me, “I was a very hyperactive child and I couldn’t funnel my energy. I did karate as a sport, which didn’t help me calm down, in fact it made me more agitated. So one day, while on holiday with my family, I met the harp by chance and fell madly in love with it; I started playing it and never stopped.

“When I was little, the thing that amazed me about the harp was its size and the idea of having to hug it to play it. I was not so much impressed by the sound, but more by its structure. When I started discovering it as an instrument, I certainly also fell in love with the sound and the vibrations.”

The harp is an instrument that seems, to the casual observer, to lend itself to tradition. Images of pretty plucking and period dramas spring to mind but that’s not what you get when you listen to music of Kety Fusco. She deviates from tradition, bringing her own spin not only on different pieces but on the perception of the instrument as a whole. This want to expand on the established parameters of the harp started from a young age.

“Having learnt the harp as a child, I can’t tell you that it was difficult because as a child you perceive things differently. I still remember that my teacher used to make me play a lot of games to learn the position of the instrument, she wasn’t a lover of technique, but rather had a game-based approach. When my first teacher died; however, I changed cities and I studied, changing my approach completely.

“I started working on the technique of the instrument by spending 8 hours a day playing scales, arpeggios, repeated notes. I must admit that I loved spending 8 hours a day working on harp technique because it didn’t make me think about anything and above all I got really good at it. The difficult thing for me was more the interpretation of the pieces. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t interpret them the way I felt, and not the author’s feeling.”

Music is prone to develop over time, you see it everywhere. Take noise. When noise music first came about and was popularised, it was more done as a representation of inaccessibility. The music sounded horrible and unlistenable but that was the point, it was a reflection of the composer’s perception on the world around them. That being said, as time moves on, people have listened to noise and developed taste in it, meaning that original principal forms the foundation that a whole new style of sound can be built upon. That constant development is something musicians as a whole seem to be relatively open to; however, it doesn’t apply as much to classical music.

When you think about the development of classical music, it is used to accompany other genres, like a rock band having a string quartet to amplify their sound. Alternatively, it might be sampled and chopped to be used in hip-hop like in Meek Mill’s ‘Lord Knows’, but there is hesitation to reimagine the sound completely. This is what Kety does, she takes an instrument whose use can be dated back to 3000 BC and dares to look at it with a fresh perspective.

“I was driven by my love for the harp itself,” she said, “I arrived at a certain point in my life that it was no longer enough for me to play and interpret other people’s pieces. I felt very frustrated because I could no longer push my creativity, I always had to respect musical rules, rules of technique, rules and only rules. Moreover, I always wondered how is it possible to think that the sound of the harp, since its existence, cannot have a real evolution? Why not go further, go beyond the rules, and look for any sound the harp can produce?”

Kety’s embodiment of innovative thinking comes together perfectly in her new album ‘The Harp, Chapter 1.’ “One day I saw a painting by Farnandez Arman called ‘Colere de Harpe’ and I thought to myself, what sound can an exploded harp give us?” She said, discussing how the album initially came about. “Of course, I would have loved to make my harp explode, but I will save that for chapter 3; for the time being, I started Chapter 1 by taking the structure of the harp and extracting sounds form its material: wood, metal and gut. From this decomposition I put together sounds and a story, a journey that is Chapter 1.

“I would like people to ask themselves questions after listening to this album. My album is just the beginning of what can be an evolution of the harp instrument. And it can’t be that after listening to it, people understand it straight away, because it takes time. It takes open-mindedness and it takes courage. So I hope that after listening someone will question it.”

As you might have guessed, ‘The Harp, Chapter 1’ is a part of something bigger as well. “The Harp is a project, based on a trilogy of albums and will end with the creation of a new prototype harp instrument.”

With the production of this album, Kety is reimagining tradition. She is changing the way that a harp can be used and in turn asks her audience to question music and their feelings towards it as a whole. When someone sets out on a task that bold and creates an album which encompasses as much as ‘The Harp, Chapter 1,’ despite it being my job, it’s difficult to put the true magnitude of the finished production into words.

“The writing process is always very complicated and tormented. I am never happy and I always want to add things until the very last moment. Change things, make changes, I feel it is never enough. It’s not just about getting into the studio, recording sounds and producing them. It’s a journey and an emotional journey, maybe I start working on an instrumental line and the next day it sucks so much that I want to change my job. It’s always ups and downs.”

Let me put it like this. The evolution of music is propelling oneself into the future using the past as a slingshot. Listen to any song released in the last year or so and you will be able to draw a line stemming from it which outlines where the song has come from. For most music, it stems back to something like rock or the blues, about 80 years ago, so that slingshot propels us forward slightly. Kety is doing the same thing but she is developing a sound that was created thousands of years ago, so when you hear ‘The Harp, Chapter 1’ you hear those sweet sounding influences but then built on top of that is sonic evolution. The amount of pull she gets on that slingshot, from those thousands of years, means the end product, the sound that the listener gets as a result, is more futuristic, exciting and innovative than anything else available at the moment.

We get the foundation, the scales and arpeggios, but we also get noise that stands out like Armageddon. “It was the easiest part for me,” she said, “I just had to forget that my harp had a material value of 20,000 euros. I took glasses and smashed them on the strings, I tore my fingernails on metal strings, I took pieces of metal and made them beat with the metal of the harp.”

A personal highlight is towards the end of the album, which is infused with chaotic energy to the point it sounds almost like you’re trapped inside of a breaking heart. “The ending of the album is not an ending really, it’s the beginning. I like that you used the words ‘breaking heart’ because that’s what the concept is: the heart of the harp, its soul, its essence and vision that shatters, evolves, changes, enters another dimension.

“It is like when a person suffers a cardiac arrest and is later resuscitated. The heart stops and then starts again with irregular pulsations, and the person from that moment changes forever. I can say this not because I suffered a cardiac arrest but because I have a ‘crazy heart’. It does not beat like any other heart, and since I discovered it, I have changed. The ending of the album represents that.”

‘The Harp, Chapter 1,’ comes out on March 3^rd and Kety Fusco is also currently on tour, playing to a sold out Royal Albert Hall on the same day. You can pre-order the album now and check other tour dates online.

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More about: Kety Fusco