On stage founding member Eugene Hütz is reminiscent of a whirlwind as he cavorts across the stage, moving from spitting words into the microphone to a guitar solo or a face-off with accordion plater Pasha Newmer. So it comes as no surprise that on the phone from his sometime hometown Rio De Janeiro, Hütz talks about the album as though it’s a ungraspable concept that is constantly changing form and meaning.
“One of the obstacles nowadays is that people think too much about music, they think too much period. Everybody confuses intelligence with thinking or rather they confuse consciousness and thinking,” contends Hütz.
“People are misinformed who believe thinking is the sole activity of the mind,” philosophises conceptual Hütz. “I believe the ultimate activity of the mind is insight and intuition and revelation and that doesn’t come from thinking that comes from perceiving and observing and experiencing and not necessarily over analysing. Pura Vida Conspiracy revolves precisely around that this music demands your attention to exist in the present.”
Pura Vida Conspiracy also represents a huge personal revelation for Hütz on what has kept the band creating music since 1999, and that Gogol Bordello has become far more than just him telling a bunch of other musicians what to do. “Gogol Bordello is a band that produces music that propels this kind of transparent feeling, a kind of subconscious momentum. For example if I start feeling that I’m having too many thoughts in the back of my mind while I am doing the show I see that as my cue to change the set, that feeling means the performance is not a moving meditation anymore. And that’s kind of how we keep the song-writing technique fresh it, that is to never become archaic because is constantly shifting itself around and rejuvenate itself,” entreats Hütz.
“Pura Vida is a kind of album where I became this creative mechanism, where a lot of it this album came to because the band was actually whistling to each other and using rehearsals as kind of a collective revelation. On our previous records it was me who wrote all the songs and the band is just backing me but here we all propel the creative energy.”
A song from Pura Vida Conspiracy that feels like something new for Gogol Bordello thematically is the seemingly very personal Lost Innocent World, a track that features the lyrics, “Lost innocent world, where did you go? I paid too high a price.” But Hütz blows this out of the water by contending that this song in fact speaks a universal message. “In a way that song is personal to the whole of civilisation. There’s an old saying that ‘everyman has to go through his hell to get to his heaven,’ and essentially these kind of archetypal stories are already out there and it is still just as vital now that we have gone through this process. It sounds paradoxical, you constantly submit to change so that you can stay the same – you constantly need to upgrade the essence of yourself to remain yourself. The more I change the more I feel like I am when I was 16.”
“I am forty this year, I am completely shocked by it every time I remember it,” contends Hütz of his own age and mortality. “I just don’t feel like how people describe it to me as what it is like being 40, for me it is pretty fucking great actually.”
“I think I will be in Argentina for my birthday, in Buenos Ares,” reveals globe-trotting gypsy. “Argentina has been an interesting place both historically and literarily. It is a spirited place, there is something about drifting in the atmosphere of Buenos Ares that still has that vibe, maybe it’s a drunk librarian in me.”
BY DENVER MAXX
