The composer and musician Horace Eugenio Spasiuk, better known by the adjective “Chango”, as his baptismal godfather once began to call him, was born in Apóstoles, province of Misiones. As a boy, along with his five brothers, he was nourished by the music of his ancestors that he listened to on the violin played by his carpenter father. He had a happy childhood with economic limitations, but he learned that only knowledge and education serve to build a future.
Accordionist, father of three daughters, cook, avid reader, surfer, he is in the midst of launching “Eiké”, his new album that includes a handful of beautiful songs recorded in his home studio with musicians such as Gustavo Santaolalla, the cellist Jacques Morelenbaum or the piper Carlos Nuñez.
Warm, polite and cordial, he receives NOTICIAS in his peaceful home in Villa Urquiza with a motto: “Ask me what you want and I’ll answer what I can.”
News: What is music to you?
Spasiuk: A very mysterious language. There is an academic aspect, but then there is another that is transferred orally. It is not something secret, but it does have to do with the essence of the traditional aspects of folk music. The sound is an expression of the place and of the man who lives there. The mechanics of that transmission is to live, breathe, move with the tempo and the dynamics of your place.
News: Would it be idiosyncrasy and not technical?
Spasiuk: Yes, it has to do with everything mental and emotional. There is a transfer of a lot of information that is not conceptual. I learned to play rural polkas from my father because he was the son of Ukrainian immigrants. A large part of all that learning is on my album “Polcas de mi tierra”. Also from him I received that vital need to relate to sound, not as mere entertainment. Atahualpa Yupanqui says: “Many times that sound becomes the shadow that the heart yearns for.” I perceived that a lot in my father and it was very nice to see it in him, a hard-working man who was moved by music. I still have his violin.
News: He gave you your first accordion?
Spasiuk: Yes. It would have been about ten or eleven years old, more or less, and I used to see that instrument at a wedding or at a fair. At that time you went to a pawn shop. My father bought it and brought it to me. Over time I had to sell it to buy another one and through a group of friends, I was able to recover it, almost thirty years later. On my new album I wanted to leave a testimony with that instrument and I recorded “Siete fig trees”, which was the first piece I learned to play. It’s like emulating the sound of when we played with my father.
News: He started performing at parties and events.
Spasiuk: I already felt like a musician, for me it was not a hobby. I had a responsibility to do that seriously with Lucas, my father, and Marcos, his brother. My entire high school was working as a musician. I knew that my father had borrowed money to buy the accordion and I was aware that we were not a family with resources.
News: Did you listen to other music at home?
Spasiuk: Not much because we were not very music lovers. The radio was playing. On the coast we don’t call it folklore but regional music. Chamames, chotis, polcas, rancheras, valseados were part of my adolescence. Then Los Abuelos de la Nada and a little bit of Michael Jackson entered my circle with “Thriller”. I didn’t buy records, but there was always someone who would copy what was heard in the discos on a cassette.
News: How was your childhood?
Spasiuk: From being barefoot climbing trees, from escaping to the mountains, from putting on shoes and overalls just to go to school. It was an intense childhood and adolescence, like the climate of the place. Not bourgeois but a lot of work, to see the need around me. From becoming responsible for the domestic dynamics of Eugenia, my mother, from a very young age, to support the whole family. It seems silly, but from there I maintain my daily responsibilities. I wash my clothes, I iron, I sew, I put together my bags. I know how to fix myself.
News: How was coming to Buenos Aires?
Spasiuk: One throws oneself off the precipice and circumstances appear. Here, despite the fact that this city is huge, complex and tough like any other cosmopolitan metropolis, I found so many kind people who helped me in one way or another, so I didn’t suffer from the move. There were countless shortcomings and tests, but, in general terms, on balance, I have capitalized on everything and I have seen it as a potential to grow, refine and develop myself. When I arrived I stayed in pieces, renting a room on Montevideo street, then I found a building manager who let me sleep in a basement, later I spent days at the house of acquaintances, until I couldn’t take it anymore, I took the train and returned to Misiones to recharge my battery eating and resting at my parents’ house.
News: Did the pianist Roberto Ramos help you on your way?
Spasiuk: In these early comings and goings, the people from the Dutch embassy saw me playing and invited me to the Eurolatina music festival in December 1987. On that trip, Ramos played in the tango orchestra, which in turn He was a copyist at the Teatro Colón. He encouraged me to come here to study and taught me to register my music in Sadaic. I would have loved if he was still alive when I recorded my album in that theater. He was a great mentor and a person who, in my eyes as a provincial, helped me do what needs to be done to organize my work. He saw the fruit in the seed, which is no small thing.
News: And in ’89 he made his debut in Cosquín.
Spasiuk: But before, Julio Mahárbiz, who had “Argentinísima”, a program on the old channel Once, had heard me at the National Yerba Mate Festival, in Apóstoles. He told me to call him when he was in Buenos Aires. Obviously I did and I went to his program on radio Belgrano and then he took me to television. He told me how I could manage to go to the festival, but, at that moment, I met Juan Carlos Saravia, from Los Chalchaleros and he invited me to play, first in Jesús María and later in Cosquín. He was very generous, condescending, he said that if he didn’t give young people space, something in them was going to die. That’s where the Consecration award came, my first album came that nobody wanted to dare to edit it and I already settled here.
News: Regarding your daily life, do you like to cook?
Spasiuk: Who likes to eat has to learn to cook (laughs). I think that in schools they should teach the basics, educate to know what a good diet is, for example. I don’t want to sound like a guru, but it makes education holistic. It’s good to learn to try to make our life a small work of art. Here with Rita, my partner, we cook regularly.
News: He places a lot of emphasis on education.
Spasiuk: Completely. Daniel Barenboim, in his book “Sound is life”, says that listening should be taught more because when doing so, sound activates a lot of motor aspects in the brain. The baby listens inside the mother’s belly and at birth everything focuses on what we see and not on what we hear.
News: Are you a big reader?
Spasiuk: Yes, before I read a lot of philosophy and things with a lot of spirituality. A few years ago I have been doing “Enramada”, a national radio program of general culture. This broadened my reading and I share with my listeners authors such as Clarice Lispector, Leila Guerriero, Julio Cortázar, Juan Forn, Eduardo Galeano or Rilke.
News: And do you surf too?
Spasiuk: Now I am far from the sea, but I love it. I discovered it about twenty years ago and it is a beautiful experience with nature that invites you to be in good physical condition. It is a beautiful sport.
News: How do you feel about the war in Ukraine?
Spasiuk: It is paradoxical that my grandparents escaped famine and war in the Ukraine and today, almost a hundred years later, humanity is still confused and alienated, without finding another tool to solve political, economic or logistical conflicts and that so many innocent people have to suffer. It touches me and brings deep mercy and sadness that it happens, not only in Ukraine, but in so many countries.
News: Do you practice any religion?
Spasiuk: I am a Sufi, a Muslim for fifteen years. Sufism is a path and a discipline that helped me find a way to review and give new meaning to everything that surrounds me. I am grateful for the gift of knowledge. Sooner or later, we are all going to ask ourselves why and what for. The Persian poet Rumi says: “Create yourself a need, delve into it and the tool will appear on the road.”
