Simon Whetham - (R)ASSEMBLE - YARMONICS 2020

“João Alegria is an essential figure in the Portuguese underground music scene. With a prolific career spanning over a decade, the guitarist – as he prefers to be called – embodies artistic commitment, resilience, and a deep devotion to crafting dark, experimental soundscapes. The numerous albums the Lisbon-based musician has released testify to a sonic vision akin to its object of study: unhurried and unperturbable, yet continuous and tempestuous."

— João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

“You paint for fame & status, I paint for freedom & awareness”, reads one of the vertical graffiti that Mr.Paradox Paradise painted on some Berlin building. Likewise, there is nothing in João Alegria’s art that is done with the intention of fame or likes. He spent more than a decade editing with recognition limited to the “community” of sound nomads. “I’ve been doing this for some time and I don’t have a very wide audience”, he admits. However, who knows, knows. And who knows, like it. João Alegria’s music is for connoisseurs. Perhaps that will always be the case.
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However, the unique contours of his art, combined with a stubborn aesthetic consistency and prolificacy, are the characteristics that simultaneously nest and vitalize it. The unconditional and obstinate way in which this “guitarist” – as he likes to be called – has created his work is a rare case of perseverance. His motivation? It’s not entirely explicit, but somewhere between the love of music and the physiological need to create lives the truth of João Alegria. If he lives because he breathes, he seems to make music because he has to live. One senses in his speech an inevitability of cathartic genesis that surreptitiously emerges between the lines like a figure wandering through the night.
João Alegria can also move through the shadows, but his music definitely points to the heavens, full of verticality” 

– João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

“Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is not my idea of things as they are. Somebody else’s idea of things to come, need not be the only way to vision the future.

What seems to be, need not be; What be, had to be; For what was, is only because of an adopted source of things. Some chosen source as was, need not be the only pattern to build a world on.” — Sun Ra




Ricardo Huisman is an Amsterdam based soundsculpture / installation artist, soundscape composer, community sound artist and artistic researcher. Inspired by Acoustic Ecology, Music Concrete, J. Cage, Avant-garde, Contemporary (Classical) Music, Sound- and Sense studies.  His installations can be experienced as multi-sensorial tactile interfaces. The “touchsound” produced by his “tactile sonic sculptures” includes composed soundscapes that reveal multiple associative dimensions, bodily sensations that could give rise to new spaces for imagination and playfull knowledge. Huisman invites people to interact within his community sound art projects, to become co-creators of their own “multisensorial hearing perspectives” and response-able and responsible joint owners of the sound habitat.

aka  DJ SENSESCAPE 
ear by ear live mixing “sensescapes”, like sound journeys, imaginary  ambiances, creating new music by instant composing with use of own field recordings and midi instruments. Presenting them with or without "tactile sonic sculptures".