anrimeal: Half Fool Half Empty

Memories of sleepy Portuguese beach towns and a chance encounter with Quelle Chris in Café Oto's bathroom

Five years ago, the artist Ana Rita de Melo Alves had a strange dream. She was drowning in the sea, when the patron Saint Christopher came to her rescue.

“When I woke up, there were fresh scratches on my face that made me remember the dream in sharp detail, and made me take it seriously,” Ana writes. “Whatever had happened in the night had crossed the line between dream and real-life skin damage – an unsettling portal between the two worlds. In some ways, I’ve been trying to close it ever since.”

On her new album Half Fool Half Empty, which originated in that strange but vivid dream, the role of the patron saint is taken by Detroit indie rap legend Quelle Chris, who recorded his part in a bathroom of London’s experimental hotspot Café Oto. Accompanied by a book of Ana’s own writings, the record has been five years in the making.

The Porto-born, London-based musician and writer, who goes by the acronymous moniker anrimeal, released her first album Could Divine to critical acclaim in 2020. A ‘computer folk record’ with influences from post-minimalist composition, it received positive reactions from the press and public.

A proud DIY spirit, Ana again produced most of the highly conceptual follow-up herself. Half Fool Half Empty consists of four pieces based on reverbed piano, hushed vocal improvisations, droning strings and raw field recordings – a gorgeous, melancholic daydream of an album.

I spoke to Ana about the long and winding road to this outstanding body of work, balancing artistic practice and a full-time music industry job, and many other things.

Ana Rita de Melo Alves, alias anrimeal

Ana, what are some of your first memories of sound?

I grew up in a Catholic family in a suburban area of Porto. My parents would take me to church since I was a baby. The first impactful memory of sound is probably just the reverberation of the church hall, the density and the many frequencies around.

Were your parents music fans, did they play instruments? What kind of music did they play around the house?

My dad actually ran a music school, and that’s where I learned music too. It was run as part of the community. Nobody was being paid for it, it was a labor of love. My dad plays the saxophone, and he has a pretty varied music taste, so he’d play a variety of things from Dire Straits and Eric Clapton to the Bulgarian State Choir. I discovered that record [Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares] when I first moved to London, and it unlocked this childhood memory.

When I was in my mom’s womb, she was playing Enya the whole time – she had an obsession with playing specific albums for each child, and mine was Enya, which kind of makes sense.

Your album Half Fool Half Empty is not just an album – it’s accompanied by a book, and it follows a semi-autobiographical narrative. The album ends at Praia da Barra, a beach near your hometown. What does that place mean to you?

When I was growing up, we would go there every summer. My grandparents have a little one bed flat there, right at the beach front. It’s shared with all of my mom’s siblings, so everyone has their two-week slot, but the kids would just stay over with all the uncles and aunts as well, so we were there for the whole three months of school holidays. That beach is just a time capsule for me. It also has the biggest lighthouse in Portugal. The sea is such an important part of Portuguese literature, music and history. Growing up, we were looking at the ocean with no almost no end, and studying our poets and listening to our music. We were basically just waking up every day, going to the beach, sleeping, reading and having ice cream, doing nothing at all.

I’m not an expert on Portuguese literature and music by any means, having just read a bit of Pessoa and barely listened to any fado. The cliché is that there’s this deeply melancholic strain running through Portuguese art.

It’s very melodramatic. It’s a very specific way of being. I only noticed that when I moved to London. I’m very earnest about things – when I love something, I love it with so much passion. In Britain, people are much more cool and reserved about things. Maybe this is a big generalization, but we’re very nostalgic, melancholic people.

When and why did you move to London?

It was nine years ago on this very day. I’d just finished a chemistry degree, but I didn’t want to go into some lab. I’d been learning music on the side the whole time. I come from the violin, then learned piano, and then started classical singing. I went to London to study music and to get a second degree in songwriting. It was my excuse to leave home, so that my family wouldn’t be super disappointed. Studying is a good excuse to leave, and also to not start working right away.

Which music school did you attend?

I went to BIM, which is a pretty pop-leaning school. I was really into conceptual art at the time. I didn’t even know what a chorus or a verse was, I just knew classical music structure – so it was really good for me and I learned a lot about how people think about music.

Why did you decide to study chemistry in the first place? Was that more of a safety net thing?

Well, I always identified more as a science person. I love numbers. I never thought I was an arts person, or even an artist. Maybe it’s the perception of music and arts education in my country that made me think like that. Music education was very focused on perfection and precision in performance, and I never identified with that. My music sensibility doesn’t rely on being able to play an instrument perfectly. It was only in composition classes that I was finally connecting the dots. I was looking at Stockhausen scores, and I found that some people were able to bridge those two worlds, and that was quite a life-changing experience.

Can you talk about the genesis of your first album Could Divine (2020)?

In the last university year, our final project was to write a piece, and I’d never tried writing an album, so I thought that would be interesting. We had a deadline, I had six months to make it. That was pretty good for me. A lot of surprising themes came up, which showed me that music can be a space for exploring inner questions. So I finished it, delivered it, got my grade, and then I had no idea what to do with it. I didn’t even like it much at the time, I was pretty embarrassed honestly. Then I started an internship at [the label] Domino, and I met a friend there that was curious and wanted to listen. They encouraged me to release it, and it was really cool to see that some people actually liked it.

It got very positive feedback, from what I saw.

Yeah, I was really surprised, because everything I do is very contained within a few tools, so I always feel like a bit behind bigger budget things. This is quite handmade, I suppose. It came out during lockdown in November 2020, and in the process of releasing that album, I was already starting to think about doing the next one. This was five years ago, so it took a long time to figure out what it’s going to be.

You’re working in the marketing department at [independent label] Warp now. So you have to juggle making art with a full-time job. How’s that been going? I mean, ‘five years’ is one possible answer to that.

Exactly, ‘five years’ is an answer to that. It definitely has ups and downs. Sometimes I’m really motivated and disciplined and have a lot of stamina, so I can just leave work, lock in until 11 pm and start again the next day. But sometimes I get frustrated, and I’m thinking, how am I meant to create a cohesive body of work like that? Even though I work in a music company, my work has nothing to do with my music – my brain works completely different in both scenarios.

My way of working is very intense. I get really obsessed and focused on specific things, and I need to do them in that very moment. So having to go to work and wait it out a lot of times, I feel I do lose a lot, and this work reflects that process. I started thinking about the album as this big rock – you know how geologically things sediment in layers, so I have these bursts of energy to create one layer, and then there are periods of inactivity, and then comes another layer. That wouldn’t have happened if I was doing music full time. I probably wouldn’t have had the patience.

In this field of experimental music, most artists have to find ways of juggling artistic practice and making ends meet.

It’s really a work of resilience. Hearing about other artists’ struggles has meant a lot to me. I feel like we’re all keeping each other motivated. We all contribute to each other’s momentum.

But that practice can also retain a certain purity and emotional quality of the work, because you’re not relying on your art to make a living.

That’s a big deal for sure. Personally I’m very protective of my process, and I don’t share things until they’re done, because I don’t believe that feedback is any helpful. I just don’t understand the point. Sure, maybe on a technical level, if I want to make a specific bass sound, I can ask a friend, how can I get this to sound better? But not on the work as a whole, that would feel even a bit silly to me.

It’s been a constant pattern in your life, drifting between opposing poles, your identity being broken up into different parts. Which is the case for everyone of us, but it feels you’re confronted with it more directly.

Yeah, that’s why I was quite drawn to the title Half Full Half Empty. I just felt like there was always a clash of two halves playing together. Maybe not a clash, more a conversation between two halves that sometimes want different things. They’re always there together, but they’re not exactly one. I still don’t know if I’ve solved the problem, but I think it was part of the question when I started understanding this work – just where am I in between those halves?

Is there really a distinction though? Isn’t both basically the same thing?

It should be the same thing. Sometimes it’s hard though. I remember when I was 19 and in university, one night I sat down at the kitchen table taking notes in my diary, and suddenly I was like, wait, why am I taking notes of my classes and notes of my personal feelings and thoughts in separate notebooks? I felt I needed to collate everything into one – this is my life, here are my thoughts and my little poems, right next to a chemical formula, and they all go beautifully together! So why have I been separating them? I felt this huge relief, it was truly mind-blowing. But it’s a constant struggle. I would like to feel more integrated, but I separate myself all the time.

At least within your artistic practice, you do connect these different forms of expression – the album is accompanied by a book with your writings, and people can experience it as a whole if they wish. Can you talk about the process of creating these works?

When I first had the dream that inspired the whole thing, I wrote a bunch of music. I was really excited at the time, but it wasn’t yet exactly what I wanted to say. I kept working on it, and a year later, I went up to my friend’s house in the north. She has her own studio there, so we played around a lot, but in the end, I was still not satisfied. I got pretty frustrated with the whole process.

I was obsessed with this idea of St Christopher, and at some point, well, I just knew it had to be Quelle Chris who does the character’s voice. When I finally met him and he actually recorded the part, it brought me new momentum and excitement. But again I just couldn’t find a final form that made sense.

So I started writing down the dream and the story. I received some funding from the Arts Council, and I got two tutors as part of that, and I used that funding to get [Welsh writer Helen Pendry] to help me. She gave me a dropbox folder full of creative writing books that she gives her to her students. I read all of those in two weeks. Okay, I’m writing a book. But how does the music really link to it? It’s been such a long, difficult process. I’m sorry if this is really boring...

Not at all. It’s actually quite fascinating.

Well, the book became this four chapter thing, and in each chapter I explore one character. That gave me the structure for the album. Finally I could start organizing all of these hours of music that I’d made. The instrumentation became obvious, because the chapters each have different themes. It all just started coming together. I felt a huge relief. Actually, the writer that I worked with, she described her process as very similar. She’ll start with so many different things, and she has no idea how they’re going to connect in the end. That gave me a bit of peace. Maybe I’m not alone in trying to put this huge puzzle together.

You just have to move forward without having the big picture yet, and there will be uncertainty and chaos and frustration, but then all the work tends to get pulled into a certain direction, as it morphs from formlessness to form.

Form is so important for me, and I really understood that through this work, because I I didn’t want to put something out that I wasn’t satisfied with. It just doesn’t make sense. I also think people can perceive it when something isn’t fully realized. For some musicians, the technical aspects take priority, so there has to be the perfect take, or the perfect instrumentalist for a part. For me, it has to have the perfect shape. For example, this work is about halves, so it has to bend in half, and each half can then fold into another half. These things were on my mind – like, how can I hold all of these parts together?

You must be happy now that it’s done.

I feel like I can enjoy music again, which is great.

Going back to the Quelle Chris feature on your album, how exactly did that happen?

We’d met online before, because when I first moved to London, I was making these stupid and silly little comedy videos, and I made one about his album at the time, the one from 2016, what was it called again?

Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often?

Exactly. I loved that one so much. So I made this little video and sent it to him, and he really liked it, but we didn’t properly meet until he played at Café Oto. We actually recorded his part in the bathroom right there. He was super sweet. Honestly, it came out exactly the way I wanted. I just wanted something fun, and I knew his brain would come up with something great. Even though I’m such a control freak in most situations, I love that he had complete range to do whatever. It took me a long time to find the right way to arrange it. I have so many versions that range from calm to really crazy, and I wanted the crazy version to win because it would show more of my production skills, but you can’t really win with that argument.

On a meta level, I loved how it showed your appreciation for underground hip-hop, which I hadn’t expected.

Hip-hop influenced so much of my music. I learned all my production methods from hip-hop, though I write in a more folky way, where I usually start with a song. But yeah, Quelle Chris just fits perfectly, his voice is just so cool. He always has really cool narrations on his albums and creates all of these crazy stories of characters. In my mind, it was always his voice doing the St Christopher character.

Can you talk about some other influences in terms of the music and composition?

Sure, but I’ll break that down into the four chapters of the album. The first chapter is based on the piano, which has been such an important instrument in my life. I’ve always loved Bartok, who influenced the album a lot and how I think about harmony in general. The last piece is directly borrowed from a violin duet that I rearranged for piano and voice. Lucy Liyou was also a huge inspiration for this chapter.

The second chapter is more about pipes and tubular structures. I was thinking about choirs and organs and organ players that I really love like Sarah Davachi, but also these chaotic amateur organists I used to hear in church all my life.

Chapter three is all about strings. My relationship with strings is complicated. For me, strings are connected to pain – playing the violin was a painful process growing up. Strings have deeply influenced my melody writing, just like a lot of guitar-based music that I grew up listening to, like Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier, and Joanne Robertson.

The last chapter is based on field recordings. I remember listening to a Grouper song, and there was this beep noise in the background, like a microwave or something…

I know, there’s a microwave sound at the end of “Labyrinth” on the Ruins album. She said somewhere that it came because of a power outage during the recording, which she apparently did in her kitchen. I love that she kept it in there.

Yeah, from that point on, I was interested in putting real life elements into the music or letting them just be there. William Basinski was also very important for me to understand that I like long, repetitive pieces of music. Like Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno, just sitting with something that is not promising you any hooks or other exciting things to grab onto. I like that attitude of not trying to alienate the listener, but just really taking your time and being okay with that.

There’s an element of surrender in that, when as a listener you realize that you don’t know where the piece is going and there’s no familiarity or structure to latch onto – you either just turn it off, or you give in to the flow.

Many artists that I like do that. They don’t invite the listener in so much as push them away, in the sense of – if you really want to stay with me, then you need to… yeah, surrender. Maybe that’s the word that I’m looking for.

In our email conversation leading to this interview, you told me you just came back from an artist residency with Chuquimamani-Condori. What was that like?

Truly inspiring. They were giving us lectures about Aymara culture [an indigenous culture in the Peruan and Bolivian Andes] and the philosophy behind their music. It was incredible to see someone really honed in on the theory behind where they’re coming from and what their music stands for. It was very academic, but in the best way possible, very well-researched. They’ve written all these unreleased academic papers about the philosophy and theory in their records, especially the latest one with with their brother [Los Thuthanaka].

After the first lecture, I went up to my room and just started crying, because obviously I love their music, but it also felt so generous to be given this gift of condensed information about indigenous culture, and not quite yet knowing what to do with it. It was validating to know that people take their craft seriously like that. Maybe it’s a flaw of working in the music industry, especially on the advertising and marketing side of it, that we often just see the finished product without realizing that this is actually someone’s whole life philosophy spanning generations, and they’re reviving the history of their family and a whole culture. That’s way bigger than just a product – it feels kind of holy in a way.

anrimeal’s new album and book Half Fool Half Empty is out now on Lost Wisdom.