Brendan Principato - The Saapato Interview
Are you originally from New York? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up, or did you make that connection through other various outlets? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years?
Yep, I’m from Long Island, not far from Fire Island actually and I grew up going to those beaches a lot as a kid. I have my dad to thank for getting me into music. He’s a classically trained guitarist and was an electronic music teacher and band director for over 40 years. He studied with Herb Deutsch in college, and as a kid taught himself to build guitar pedals and noise boxes before many people were really doing that sort of thing. He’s been a tinkerer and a freak for this stuff since the 60s. He was always spinning tons of music at home. Jean-Michel Jarre, Chick Corea, Kitaro, and Suzanne Ciani were some of his regulars. He also exposed me to stuff like Satie, Stockhausen, Liszt, and Chopin. The first record he showed me that really clicked though was sort of at the intersection of these two zones. That record was “Snowflakes Are Dancing” by Tomita. It’s an album of synthesizer reimaginings of Debussy music and it blew my mind wide open. This was all when I was super young, I think I heard that Tomita album for the first time when I was 10, or 11. As I got a bit older and gained access to the internet I started to do my own digging. Some formative influences from my teenage years that come to mind are The KLF’s Chill Out, Evening Star, early AnCo records, Chakra Suite by Steven Halpern, and POP by Gas.
Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to putting together Saapato? How did you initially go about writing and recording your debut back in 2018 entitled “When Thought Retreats”? I understand you donated some of the proceeds to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation for this album. I’m very interested to know what inspired that decision.
I moved to Philly in 2017 and was playing in bands, unemployed, and depressed out of my gourd. The tracks that ended up becoming “When Thought Retreats” were a way for me to try and step away from thinking critically about music, and an attempt at untangling my mind. At the time I was trying all sorts of meditation and medication and nothing worked as well as just sitting and working on those songs. Initially, I had no intention of ever releasing that music, (or any ambient music), but came around to the idea in a strange moment. One night my friend Bill and I are cooking dinner together and listening to a bunch of records - I remember that Huerco S.’ 2016 album was playing while I was chopping garlic. I’m not sure why, but I had this intense wave of calm come over me. For whatever reason at that moment I was like, ‘ok I’m going to put this sort of music out.’ It just felt like the right thing to do. To this day, Bill and I still talk about what a bizarrely impactful night that was for each of us. It felt like we were safe there together, or something. I donated the proceeds to The B and B Research Foundation simply because I was going through it and had read they were doing valuable work helping people who were struggling with mental health issues. It wasn’t anything more than that, although it did become a recurring theme for me. With each ambient release I put out I’ve donated to different orgs that felt aligned to the album and/or the headspace I was in while making it. Also I guess that initial impulse played a part in me starting my virtual concert series during the pandemic to raise money for charities. That project ended up raising over $20,000 for a dozen, or so different orgs, which still blows my mind. It was amazing to see people show up and support that sort of thing!
Leading up to your most recent effort, “On Fire Island”, you’ve released a number of albums such as “The Beginning Of The End Of Your Pain”, “Fragile Comforts Vol. 1” and last year’s “Somewhere Else” on TX based label Aural Canyon. Tell me about some of the projects and how much had changed and evolved in your process leading up to “Somewhere Else”.
Sure thing - “Beginning Of The End Of Your Pain” was another project similar to “When Thought Retreats” where I was just noodling around without the intention of releasing anything. I was obsessed with hawaiian/polynesian/slack key music for a few years. At night when I couldn’t sleep I used to just plug my phone into my pedal board and capture hundreds of loops from songs I liked and process them through all sorts of delays. It was a self soothing lullaby of sorts. Often I’d wake up hours later on top of my pedal board with an aching back. Eventually I began sequencing select loops, organizing them into samplers and cycling through them and in a sense “performing” them. I recorded the album in a single take after playing through the refined sequence for months. My friend Drew ran the board for me and did some live mixing/EQing to ensure nothing clipped. It was really fun to make. “Fragile Comforts” was a 7” I did for my friend Ben’s (Constant Smiles) label Cold Moon records. Actually the title of that release was also inspired by that night chopping garlic with Bill. I always referred to that night as a Fragile Comfort so I composed two tracks about other Fragile Comforts I’d experienced.
“Becomes Clear” was the first full length album that I knew I’d release while I was making it. My process remained similar to the earlier material in that creating it was a form of meditation. It was also the first record where field recordings started to play a larger part in the music I was making. I realized at a certain point that maybe even more than music I love sound so my practice shifted and I started to focus on sounds first and music second. “Somewhere Else” was where my ideas around found sound and collage really crystallized and melded with my love of nature. Funny enough, although much of the source material for “Somewhere Else” existed before I recorded “On Fire Island”, the ethos of SE was actually in direct response to my time spent “On Fire Island”. After being so zoomed in and focused on creating music that reflected the sonic footprint of a physical, tangible place, I wanted to make an album of an impossible place, a psychic place. That desire sent me down a rabbit hole of collaging field recordings I had captured across years and continents in an attempt to create something that felt as alien as it was nostalgic. Even the cover which was created by my friend Early Fern reflects this. All of the plants found in that image would never be found together on earth. The ecosystem makes no sense.
I’m very curious to know your approach and particular vision for writing and recording “On Fire Island”, which was released just a little over a month ago. Would you mind giving some details behind songs like “Midday Storm Dissolving”, “Morning Swale Song” and the title track?
”On Fire Island” is the result of an artist residency I did with the National Park Service back in September of 2022. I went out to a bungalow in a remote wilderness area of Fire Island’s National Seashore for two weeks to take field recordings and compose. For anyone who hasn’t been, FI is a mystical place. There’s no cars allowed anywhere on the island, there’s a huge party culture on the southern end of it, and the northern part where I was is completely remote and riddled with tons of rare and threatened ecosystems. Initially, I expected the album to be a document of avian life that inhabits the island, but as I quickly learned, September is shoulder season, which means all the birds are migrating rather than breeding, so they’re busy and are basically silent. Fire Island challenged me to become a better listener, and I did. What I heard first as just wind, waves, and bugs quickly turned into something much more nuanced. I began to note the difference between how the wind sounded through cord grass versus beach grass. The ways in which the timbres of bug calls would shift throughout the day, how the waves sounded before and after storms, and how often a plane or helicopter would break the natural soundscape.
All of these observations compounded and before long I was hearing wind and water unlike ever before. Every sound felt like it had a story to tell as stupid as that feels to say. I walked 8-12 miles per day along the beach, in the swale, through the marshes, along the bay - wherever I could get trying to see and hear as much of the island as possible. In doing this I realized that the music I wanted to compose for On Fire Island would try to compliment the natural sound rather than incorporate it. The island was the protagonist and all of the composed melodic elements would just play supporting roles. So much about Fire Island is being taken away by human intervention; the shoreline is receding, the dunes are full of balloons and other trash, the airplane drones are nearly constant (JFK airport is nearby) - the island is disappearing and the climate models for the next 50 years are not very encouraging either... Depicting that beauty and that desperate fragility became the principal objective of the album. In terms of specific recording techniques I used, “Morning Swale Song” was fully recorded out in the field. I set omni microphones up around 8am behind the primary dune to pick up the bugs and wind of that zone and connected my OP-1 to my field recorder and just played along with the environment.
That five minute track is culled from over an hour of improvisation. The field recordings on “Midday Storm Dissolving” were taken during a 10 minute squall. As the rain began to beat down I quickly opened all the windows of the shack I was staying in and set mics up; front of the house toward the sea, back of the house toward the bay, under the house surrounded by blowing reeds and run off, etc. The field recording you hear on that track is the actual length of that storm minus the 2-3 minutes it took me to get mics rolling. The organ line that emerges toward the latter half of the track popped into my head while the storm waned so recording it took no time. When the rain stopped I turned my amp all the way up and recorded all the synths into the microphones which remained in the exact same positions they were in when they captured the storm. The title track was aimed at depicting a full 24 hours on the island. I wanted it to showcase the depth and breadth of the sounds I heard across the various regions of the area. When I hear it, I really get taken back there. I tried to create a ‘come along on this journey with me’ sort of feeling to the track. Just like Fire Island, it’s patient, it’s quiet, it’s loud, it’s fragile, and it morphs again and again and again.
What lies ahead as summer truly begins to unfold? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
I love the warmer months. I live in the woods and everything has started to come alive and bloom, it’s inspiring stuff. Most of my days this time of year are spent hiking, swimming in the river near my house, and observing wildlife. In terms of upcoming projects, I’ve got an album I’m putting together from a residency in Alaska last August, and another record I’m just starting to mix plus a finished record coming out late this year via Aural Canyon that may be my favorite thing I’ve ever made. That album is a single 48 minute track built around a field recording I captured last June at a farm near where I live. I’ve also got a collaborative album nearing completion that features over 15 of my favorite experimental artists. That one has been in the works for more than three years, so I’m looking forward to finally getting it out there. Lastly, I’m in the beginning stages of another collaborative record with my friend Chazz Knapp, which I’m super stoked about! Lots of balls in the air, lots of ideas spinning around, lots to keep busy with. Making this sort of music has become a central fixture in my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been great chatting with you, thanks again for having me on!
