vai bem de encontro ao título do álbum :)

Portuguese composer and pianist (also a researcher of the present day connections between art, science and technology) Simão Costa is a unique kind of fetichist. The object of his desire is the piano: you listen to his playing and it’s clear that he’s in love with its inner sound and the musical grammars developed in these three last centuries for the instrument invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori. All those intersected in “π_ANO PRE·CAU·TION PER·CU·SSION ON SHORT CIRCUIT”, coming from the classical tradition, the experimental explorations of the black-and-white keyboard or the strings inside, and also jazz and improvised music.

But for him, like for any other fetichist, this is not enough: his imagination wants to bring the piano to its limits and beyond, even if this means a radical transfiguration of its nature and purposes. He uses computer electronics either for a radically different diffusion, and perception, of the sounds produced, and for their processing in real time, through granulation and synthesis. The result: sometimes simultaneously, a return to the most primal of all musical approaches, a percussive one, and the transformation of the piano into a sophisticated electro-acoustic device of the 21st century.

John Cage-like preparations and the type of fluctuating non-linear phrases we heard in some of Morton Feldman’s compositions live together with repeated rhythmic syncopations, like if Thelonious Monk and Steve Reich were the same person, and with the kind of atmospheres that we imagine Brian Eno and Alvin Lucier could make together. All this is made with a clinical ear. We imagine Simão Costa in a dissecting (torture) table, opening human organs to discover what makes them tickle, while they tickle.

http://shhpuma.com/shh009cd/

SHH009 // SIMAO COSTA // “π_ANO PRE·CAU·TION PER·CU·SSION ON SHORT CIRCUIT”

Also internationally known as the man behind the ADDAC Systems brand of modular synthesizers and several devices for electronic music, Portuguese sound and intermedia artist André Gonçalves is back with a new solo album, just one year after the release of “Musica Eterna – Pocket Music for the Space-Time Traveller”.
Fortunately so, because he was absent from the recording world for too long (10 years!), and because “Currents & Riptides” is an absolute marvel, establishing his music as one of the most intriguing in the experimental scene. Every kind of situation you can imagine is covered here, not to show off what he can do, but emerging naturally in the flux of events: combinations of analogic and digital sounds and tools, processing of field recordings and ready-made materials (the mutant electric guitar you can recognize because he wants you to), explorations of provoked or casual accidents, ambient soundscapes, noise, textures in constant change, immersive and insistent drones, you name it. When Gonçalves arrives to something beautiful and pleasing, he can’t resist to act against it with a rough contrast, like an ugly feedback or a cable violently taken out.
André Gonçalves may not appear much, even in concert, but when he does, in Portugal or somewhere else, is for maximum effect. This is one of those occasions. Behind him he has a long background, alone or with other people, playing under designations like OK Suitcase, Last Time This Happened We Had a Street Party, Stapletape, Gigantiq, Feltro and more. He likes to do laboratorial work, shaping structures, but also to improvise, and he did it Achim Wollscheid, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Casper Klausen, David Maranha, Eric La Casa, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Kenneth Kirschner, Manuel Mota, Michel J. Schumacher, Ernesto Rodrigues, Richard Garet, Phill Niblock, Sei Miguel and Tim Hecker between many others. It’s impossible to say if this music was produced in studio or freely improvised: sometimes it seems something meticulously composed, and other times it comes like the crude result of spontaneity. That doubt is what seduces us, knowing that the reverse is also highly probable. With him, we never know.

ANDRÉ GONÇALVES // Currents & Riptides

shhpuma records

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João Paulo Fonseca

A 2 P aka MUDDO

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ZZY

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