Athens based Tango Mangalore has travelled a long time in the seas of grotesque art, therefore we reached him for an interview, and so he answered…and on 29th October the artist will perform at Velvet Room downtown Athens sharing the stage with Doric, and Dead Clouds. Decadent cabaret art that emerges from…..read his thoughts and answers in the following lines.
Who is the ‘sailor’ Tango Mangalore, which sea was he born in and what made him sing oceanic, weird and haunted tales?
Tango Mangalore is the persona of a project that was created by my human vessel -Y.S.- some nautical miles away from the shores of Zanzibar aboard a travelling ship at the winter of 2013 to explore and express my perversions and fantasies around the morbidity of the Sea and its numerous tales regarding myths or historical facts with a touch of cynical black humor and naughty-cal romance.
What are the instruments and stuff that the sailor uses for chanting his tales?
I started making my first songs not knowing what I was doing just by using a midi controller and some VST instruments. As time passed I went deeper into the synthesizer world and now I combine digital/analog instruments like OP-1,JX-03,D.S Mopho X4,MFB-522 and recently I started adding to my music a theremin, an omnichord and a mellotron, amongst other stuff like dead parrots, fish bones and my mother’s favorite brush (stuff that most of the times can prove to be even more effective since creativity to me is the will and the psyche for someone to create in any possible means he can come across).
Influenced by wave music, the ‘sailor’ defines his art as decadent cabaret music, a few words please on that…
Indeed the ‘sailor’ is inspired and influenced by synthwave music, dark cabaret, deathrock and a wide variety of spooky and grimmish genres which in my case I combine in my own way and I define them in the self-created terms of wave noir and decadent cabaret which mostly refers to tragic part of the lyrics ,the circus/waltz melodies and the funny, dramatic, mutant, theatrical atmosphere and often self-sarcastic performance.
Which are the ‘corals’ that may influence his music, what musings is he keen on and inspired by?
Maritime curiosities, the strange and the bizarre in the fictional world of art, the magic and the horror, the cold grip of solitude, the scent of something futile in the human relationships, the ever going battle inside of me to decide whether I finally love or hate the human, the lonely and the emotionally disfigured and generally all sorts of obscure and silly funny characters of the Dark SECTA like Nora Keyes, Anton LaVey etc.
Poetry, morbid tales and a scent of death-rock in the lyrics. What does really inspire you in putting that grime on your pen, and why?
I do like to narrate weird oceanic tales about dead men travelling under the celestial concave, the ghost sailors, this rather overwhelming world that appears to make no sense or whatsoever, the broken and cursed characters of life that I happen to stumble upon my journeys and often make me wonder if there is really life before death in the land of the shore. Mostly the oddity of being itself is basically what inspires me to put that grime in my pen.
Earlier in February Tango Mangalore released ‘Contra Los Vampiros Y Hombre Lobo Discoteca’, working with DoCtor MuTantO. How come…?
It all started as a joke between me and the DoCtor MuTantO when he came to visit me for a couple of days. After a long drunk weekend we ended up jamming in my place as an effort to recover from the devastating hangover. Songs were coming to place(or that’s what we thought at that moment) and we contacted Mr.Xiii seeking for spiritual guidance and higher forms of necrid inspiration. Being sleepless for 3 days he finally got back to us with a somewhat odd Romanian vampiric fairytale and a strange soundscape regarding a common dream we had few days ago. Then almost as if it was preordained, F. from Dark Liquid Records asked me if I was interested on limited release in crazy formats. We thought that entire material was absurd, mutant, yet honest to our true natures and aesthetics, so we decided we should proceed. The title was inspired by Santo, Enmascarado De La Plata, an underground star in a series of Mexican B Movies that I was quite fascinated at that time watching his films obsessively. So it was a multi monster friendly collaboration that came out very spontaneously, in the time period of a week actually, and we had great fun in the process of making it.
On October 29th Mangalore shares the stage with Dead Clouds and Doric in Velvet Room, Athens. What are we expecting there from the ‘sailor’? Are you performing alone or having guests on that night?
It will be a short set including old and new songs. Due to the fact that I have just returned to the shore with an injured hand, Mr.Xiii will be my phantom limb and ghastly guest. At some point Mr.Xiii will silently pray, invoke and be possessed by the ghost of บุนนากรินทร์ in a short attempt to seem sexy. All you interested in such an odd Spook-O-rama are welcome.
Any new music at the moment? By which label and what are we about to listen?
I had some magical travels myself this past year and I have known love and inspiration on a whole new level so I guess I am cooking a few tunes in my casserole of banana jacks and hopefully I will make a release out of it if the tide is on my favor. When and in which label, still remains a mystery even to me.
Thanks for talking ‘sailor’, you won your load in rum, last words on you…
Last famous words…well we have a saying out at the Seas ‘There is enough blue in the sky to make a sailors trousers’. Thank you.
Photo credits: Kitilinos FGT (first one), Eva Brown (2nd one)
Mike Dimitriou