Áron Porteleki: Áron Porteleki’s cloak – Experience of Insight

My home is around an hour bike ride from my rehearsal room. I’ve taken this trip almost every day in the past 3 months, most of the time I rode on the Buda side of the city completely empty, on a route where human presence and car traffic were minimal. I got to know my hometown from many whole different, unknown aspects; new moods, new colours.  I repeatedly toyed with the idea of what it would like to be a street musician without an ‘audience’, who seemingly only plays music for himself, but actually plays for a larger ‘soul’ – the city.

This idea resonates with the favorite storybook of my childhood, “Pimpalin’s cloak”, which shows an ex-music clown’s daily routine. He goes out to the woods every morning, picking up his instruments one by one, playing music in different moods for different weather for his audience, the animals of the forest. After going through all the instruments, he puts them in his cloak and goes home, and the tale ends here.

I will make 5 mini-concerts during my 5 hour walk, the “venues” were selected by the significance of their appearance in my mind when I’m thinking of the route with my eyes shut.

I am a Hungarian, Budapest based drummer and viola player. I work with several music groups in the field of free improvised, contemporary, electronic, jazz and folk music, as well as creating music for contemporary dance & theater pieces. As a kid I learned on a special type of viola with 3-strings from gypsies in Transylvania, and later took jazz drum lessons from different Hungarian masters. I studied cultural anthropology at ELTE, Budapest.
As a drummer I’m interested in a type of improvisation which is above genres and forms, and relying only on the present situation. I’m also experimenting with the possible connections between different approaches of improvisation found in folk music and jazz. I’m developing a non-metrical special way of rubato playing on drums which is mainly comes from my folk music experiences as a viola player, but also mixed with the traditions of free-jazz.