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saudade (noun) [sɐwˈðað], [sawˈdadʒi], [sawˈðaðe] 

a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. it describes a felt emptiness or absence--a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic longing for an absent something or someone. it often carries the repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return. 

also described as "the love that remains", and is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement or pleasure. it is both a sad and happy feeling--sadness for missing and gladness for having experienced the memory.
credits
released 23 November 2013 
produced by jason tan 
photo by chew wei shan 
written, arranged and performed by .gif

box burning

More than a year after the release of saudade, .gif revisits their debut EP with the help of a host of talented producers, inviting them to reinterpret the tracks with their own unique take on the material. With co-conspirators DUNCE., .gif are proud to present RE:saudade - a remix album in the spirit of looking back with new eyes.

Track mastered by Jason Tan.

Album Artwork by Marc Gabriel Loh. 

For more from FuturaHelvetica, please visit https://soundcloud.com/futurahelvetica



Good Night Green Light (FuturaHelvetica Italics Mix)

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juvenile

blanche

Din wrote this track as a homage to Aphex Twin’s aisatsana [102]. It was meant to be an instrumental, but Jason had me try layering vocals over it and it just stuck. I wrote the lyrics standing outside my front door, dreading going in and buying time before I had to step into the house.

- weish

HAIL NOTHING

Support

UNHOME

This was written at a time I felt… at a complete loss as to how to love and support someone going through a deep depression. You want to go down the rabbit hole with them, experience and comprehend this sunken place, hold their hand down there, where they feel most alone. But you can’t. It’s not your place, you’ll never understand, you’ll never be enough.

But with the sweeping, transcendent synth and production work that Din and Jason created… it transforms the whole song into this cathartic dance that again, urges you to abandon all expectations of yourself and run free.

- weish

NOT MY PLACE

Put simply, this is a track about giving up on your dreams, hahaha. Well, the main hook goes:

‘cause all we got is 

a universe of empty words

and songs are only songs, my love, my love

in a universe of empty words

feel their rhythm on your tongue

and the way they make ya dance

The song urges us to free all language from meaning in favour of enjoying the mere sound of words on our tongues. I guess that captures what the album wants to say –– be unapologetic, be mediocre, be nothing, and go forth! Dance blithely into the void. Celebrate the great chaos and wonderful arbitrariness of existence.

LET'S GO

This one was a more straightforward response to being disillusioned with our own work, and our place in the scene, in the industry, in the larger scheme of things. Collaborating with Usaama was very precious to us––he made me cry with his spoken word set in Cambridge a couple years back––and we love how his verse captured and expounded on the existential despair of the track, while retaining that feisty attitude.

- weish

DONE (done done) ft. Usaama Minhas

This is a playful one, with some cheeky wordplay that was fun to write and even more fun to perform. Jason and Din did some amazing production work here to make it sound mystical and immersive, which made the whole tone of the song even more self–aware in laughing at itself for being, well, an “indulgent interlude”.

- weish

INDULGENT INTERLUDE

This is a special one; it’s our first single and has been receiving the most press, but its origins are far less glamorous. I wrote this song in the toilet… while struggling to breathe, curled up on the floor and having my first ever panic attack. It felt so new and foreign and earth–shattering at the time… I had hyperventilated and cried non–stop for an hour and a half before I decided to write something, anything, just to focus my attention on one thing. And so this song was born.

- weish

MY DARLING

This song starts off describing the day–to–day fatigue of living, always feeling like you are “trailing two steps behind” your body, floating through life and hating yourself for not being able to be present. But then comes a sort of desperate bridge:

“yet we are here. and while alive

in the grey still of every night

i’ll gaze upon a foreign sky

and whisper to the wind that i

love you and some day you'll find 

my broken vowels drifting by

as ghosts, turning and rustling like

an old map from another time”

I guess it’s a way of telling myself that even if everything is for nothing, we can’t help but be alive, and so it’s worth shouting into the void anyway… even if nobody hears you.

- weish

AND WHILE ALIVE

We love the polyrhythms in this song… the bass and the vocals and the drums all sort of live in their own tempo. Adel from Amateur Takes Control was recently trying to learn the bassline in the track and admitted to us he was having a hard time –– something we take as a huge compliment, considering how complex and technical his own writing is. 

This is a song about abandonment; abandoning a hope that you can ever know yourself or what you’re meant to do, abandoning all delusions of grandeur or claims to being significant in any way.

VACANT SPECK

This might be our favourite track, not least because Bani is on it. Like we said, we worship the guy. Because his talents and interests are so vastly varied it’s been a long, long time since he’s sung with that magnificent voice of his… and many people miss his singing from the good old B-Quartet days. Co-writing this song with him was magic –– it really captured a sense of overwhelming longing, of trying to return to a feeling that is already gone, of being swept away by helplessness.

ONLY YOURS ft. Bani Haykal

We stand in solidarity with Jolovan Wham.

- weish and din

For Better Days

Pronounced |dot jif|, .gif is an electronic duo comprising weish and din. The two treat .gif as a space of freedom, respite, and honesty. They strive to make electronic music that combines lush soundscapes with lyrics that are intensely personal and hopefully, meaningful.

.gif

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