“Downhill Vignettes” emerged from digging into all my previous recordings as an exercise to better understand my work so far and the direction of the new album yet to come. During this listening, I discovered many places and landscapes I was not aware I’d visited, but they really define me more as a listener than a producer. After a long downhill year, it felt right to release it as a kind of exorcism of the past and a scope into the future.

A personal exercise and joyful play from exploring deep into my jams and recordings to the experimentation on mixing and editing.
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released December 29, 2023

Composed, Produced and Mixed by Clothilde
Cover by Clothilde

Downhill Vignettes

Jolt

09 - JOLT

Puzzled

05 - PUZZLED

Uneven

04 - UNEVEN

Muddy

03 - MUDDY

Lost

02 - LOST

Zero-Zero

01 - ZERO - ZERO

Out of the eight “Principles Of The New Man”, making up the play staged at Malaposta in October/November 2020, four are cut out for this independent soundtrack release. Precisely those which author and director Pedro Saavedra designated for distinct sound pieces. The remaining four are accompanied by The Background (“A Base”), a long, hypnotic, meditative and pulsating piece over which the listener is offered a chance of imaginative creation, just as in the play it assumes a background role to the text and music.

The author’s briefing and Clothilde’s attentive listening to the (long) original text were the sources for the composition. Each track was completed in one take, no editing. The music thus simulates a live performance, careful to adapt to the stage action but also respecting the natural rhythm of the equipment the artist manipulates. This – shall we say – organic dialogue is itself the creative process and generates a sort of autonomous area where woman and machine cannot be dissociated from each other.

Austere march across a barren land which, through sound, reminds us of the flat surface in Moderan, from the homonymous classic science fiction series of short stories. The titles themselves (“The Dawn”, “The War”, “The Fortress”, “The New World”) resonate as big keywords, each one a full epic suggesting the action in Moderan, within a narrative arc which follows the stage scenography´s conflict between light and darkness.
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A Base

O Novomundo

A Fortaleza

A Guerra

A Alvorada

Debut Album of Clothilde, Twitcher was made and shaped using Clothilde’s partner, Hobo, homemade machinery and modulars with each track recorded in one take and filling us up with textures, melodies and sections of zero visible ending points echoing Annea Lockwood, Jessica Rylan, Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher and Radigue in a mesh of primal experimentation and awe.
52 minutes of deep listening brutalism.

Songer

Observe

Fallout

Spark

Big Day Part II

Big Day Part I

First

Live at ZDB

Clothilde and her machines have an intimate relationship. Built from scratch by her partner Zé Diogo these modular machines have their own identity and authenticity. Clothilde approaches them as equals and that resonates in the music she creates. She or they, because at some point you can’t really differentiate one from another. That’s the beauty of Clothilde’s music, she has a unique empathy with the machines/instruments she uses, and that relationship expresses itself in every moment. This creates music impossible to predict, not necessarily related to improvisation, randomness or chaos theory, but to the unknown dialogue between humans and machines. It is a primal sense of electronic music, but one that engages the listener into a constant idea of world building. Marvellous and intense. Releases like “Twitcher” (Labareda, 2018) and “Os Princípios do Novo Homem” (Holuzam, 2021) show how pure, transparent and organic Clothilde’s sound is.

Clothilde

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