An Interview With: Ramper

Ramper, a post-rock/slowcore outfit based in Granada, Spain, caught my attention back in 2020 with the release of their debut project 'Nuestros mejores deseos'. A viscous and slow-burning experience that would eventually find its way onto my Top 50 albums of 2020. Two years on and the wait for their sophomore release has well and truly begun.

Pulling on influences from bands such as Sigur Ros and Swans, Ramper are truly students of the atmospheric, yet potentially ferocious, world of post-rock.

Find out a bit about the band, their interests and things alike below.

Peter: Nuestros mejores deseos, your debut album released in 2020, gives off a rather heavy and melancholic feel. Do you guys think that this aligns with your personality as individuals? Would you regard yourselves as 'melancholic' or 'heavy' people?

Ángel: This is a very good question, or at least it's something I've thought about a lot. I must say that the four of us are very funny people. When we get together we are all most of the time cracking jokes, creating stupid imaginary scenarios and just being strangely funny. I truly believe that people think of us as very cheerful and fun people.
However, there is no doubt that I am a person with quite a few bouts of sadness. This is not permanent but something that comes and goes depending on where I am in my life. Now those moments are very short and stay with me very little, but when Ramper started I was not as happy as I am now with my life.
Anyway, you mentioned melancholy and not sadness and I think that's a pretty accurate observation. I don't think sadness and melancholy are the same thing. I think it was in a Cioran book where I read it, but melancholy is not implicitly negative, which sadness is. Nuestros mejores deseos is melancholic but not sad. There is always a sense of hope around the songs. It's not depressing because all is not lost, we just look back and see how things could have gone and take other directions.
Melancholy is very present in my life. I am a person who constantly thinks about all those good times in the past and all those lost futures. Not from sadness, but from a deeper place in my gut. A feeling close to those butterflies in your stomach when you fall in love.
Finally, there is a very good Spanish artist, Estrella fugaz, who says in Un sendero fluorescente that the best sad music is made by the happiest people. That's that.

Antonio: I don’t know what comes first, the chicken or the egg, but I think you must have some of those feelings to be into this kind of music. As we were music fans before having a band, and we were all interested in heavy and melancholic music, I guess there must be something that attracts us from it. 

Peter: What was the thought process behind releasing a live album in 2019 before the release of the debut in 2020?

Ángel: We needed to record something soon so we could start playing gigs. The venue where we played our first gig had a system where each instrument was recorded individually. So they gave us those recordings and Alvaro did a great mix out of them. There was also additional material recorded later by us, but most of the stuff you can hear is taken from our first concert (which wasn't a great concert, of course).
Antonio: We wanted to have something to show so people could understand what kind of music we did. This was the fastest and cheapest option for us to record a demo. 

Peter: What does post-rock mean to you? And how do you incorporate this meaning into your music?

Ángel: Post-rock is much more than crescendo-core, if that's what you're implicitly asking. I think we think of post-rock in the same way as the people who "created" it: without thinking about it very much. The music we were making in the beginning wasn't a very deliberate thing, meaning we weren't sure what directions we were taking as we were creating the songs. We'd play together and things would just come up and we'd take advantage of it. Most of the things we've done have come from improvisation.
It's nice, I think. The music we create comes from a completely genuine place, where our personalities are poured out and blended together without necessarily thinking about conforming to a particular sound or aesthetic. That's also hard for us as an audience, because it's difficult to fit into a scene.
We know each other a lot better now than we did before. That also means we know better what kind of things we are able to create together (what our sound is in a way) and, of course, we know our limitations.
Meaning usually comes from feeling. After we find something we like, we start "thinking" about what that thing makes us feel and try to compose a song following that feeling. It also helps us to get ideas from other songs we like.
The lyrics always come later. We try to find something that fits spiritually with the music we have made.

Joserto: Although the music genre post-rock is one of my most listened music spectrum ever, at this moment I still struggle to describe the genre precisely. As far as I know, a good quality post-rock piece must to be able to recreate the listener into a inner world, been guided through the musical narrative that speaks for itself.  
‘Atmosphere’ concept is widely used for this music context. How ever, I think is very easy to fall into some ‘atmosphere cliches’, losing the narrative characteristics mentioned before. This happened when bands only try to replicate the sound of their source of inspiration. 
During the composition process in Ramper we try to avoid these cliches by thinking first of visual concepts or very specific cinematographic scenarios. Then, we put the effort into creating music capable of evoking the visual situation in a subjective way, we never intend to be too literal. In that sense is how I think we create our music within the post-rock philosophy. 
It could be said that this musical approximation is not exclusive to post-rock and I can’t agree more. What take us a stance on this genre is the tools we have to create music: A rock band line-up and our musical training, which has consisted basically in learning instruments by playing along songs we used to listen years ago.
Antonio: I think we are comfortable with the label post-rock in the way of experimental music made with rock instruments that can accommodate artists as diverse as Slint, Talk Talk, Tortoise, GY!BE or Stereolab. That label has changed meaning over time, and I don’t think we feel very identified with a lot of music that falls under post rock nowadays. In our creative process it is much more important mixing styles and finding new sounds than adhering to a specific genre.. 

Peter: Can you name three albums that you have been listening to as of late, or that has inspired/is inspiring your latest work?

Ángel: I've been listening to a lot of Deftones in the last few months. Specifically White Pony, of course. I don't think that album will be as present on our next one as it was on Nuestros mejores deseos, something I wasn't aware of before. I was recently obsessed with the new Niños del cerro and Birds in Row albums. Maybe we'll take something from the Argentinians for our new material. I haven't listened to it much, but I think we'd all agree that Richard Dawson's new stuff has a pretty similar spirit to our new material, since we're getting into darker folk atmospheres.
Antonio: My most listened albums of the year is Ants from Up There by Black Country, New Road and Qubits by Erik Urano and Merca Bae. As music that is inspiring new Ramper work, maybe 90s Swans is being important (White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, Soundtrack for the Blind…) in the last things we are doing.
Joserto: It's very hard for me to think of three albums that I personally like that have influenced our latest work, because my latest obsession has been to go back to being a teenager listening to Turnstile. 
However, you could say that my drumming has been influenced by jazz artists, and I'm trying to explore that especially on the new Ramper songs. I can say that some of the classic jazz artists I listen to the most are: Marion Brown, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders... or more contemporary ones like Angel Bat Dawid or Yusef Lateef.

Peter: Is there a scene in your locale (Granada area) that people should be aware of? If so, can you name a few acts to check out from this scene.

Ángel: Not a scene as such. There could be one, but we are not very interested in it. We like Nievla, Ática, Elemento Deserto. All of them are very good rock bands in our opinion. Plasaporros is closer to the electronic zoomery "maquineo", as we call it here, but I love them. They are very talented. There's also this guy called Chico blanco who makes a great quality urban techno that we're not very used to here. Paco Moreno is also based here and I personally think he has a very unique sound.
Antonio: I feel that part of the motivation for the band was that there were not much music like what we do around us. 

Peter: What do you guys enjoy outside of the music world? Do you find that these things can be found inside of your music?

Ángel: Except for Joserto (who is not so into that), we all love video games. We play a lot of different things and we love to discuss the games we play. We actually spend a lot of time chatting about movies, TV shows, paintings or whatever. It's one of my favorite things about hanging out together. We also love to cook and have even joked about leaving the band and opening a restaurant instead. And regarding the second question, yes, of course. For example, when we were composing Niña en vela, Alvaro kept saying that he would like to transport the same feeling he got from Yomawari, Silent Hill 2 or the Halloween season of Animal Crossing.

Peter: And finally, what can fans of Ramper expect from the band in the near/distant future?

Ángel: If our predictions are correct, we will launch the next thing in early 2024. We know it's been too long since Nuestros mejores deseos, but that's just the way we are. Our creative process is very slow, we take our time doing things, we rewrite a lot of things, we get angry with things we don't like so much.
The new album might be shorter than our previous material, but much more conscious and slow-cooked. We pay more attention to detail now and, of course, we are better musicians than before. Alvaro has improved a lot singing and is no longer afraid to show his voice.
There is more variety on the new album but at the same time I think we have achieved a very uniform feel throughout the songs. This one is darker, more folky, less metal I guess, more progressive and more "singable". The melodies are more present than ever, which makes it more pop? I'm not so sure about that.