Lisboa Soa è un festival di sound art, cultura dell’ascolto ed ecologia. L’obiettivo dichiarato di questa rassegna è la valorizzazione della musica contemporanea che abbia anche un significato sociale ed ecologico, in modo da produrre una maggiore coscienza ambientale e dell’impatto determinato dalla nostra presenza.
Nel 2021, dopo cinque edizioni, Lisboa Soa ha deciso di commissionare quattro composizioni ad altrettanti artisti portoghesi con lo scopo di creare qualcosa che parlasse di memoria, ma guardasse anche al futuro. Gli artisti coinvolti sono stati Joao Castro Pinto, Sara Pinheiro, Mestre André e Ana Guedes, ed il risultato finale è uscito per la celebre Crónica Records.
“Efflux”, firmato dal primo dei quattro, è un viaggio di quasi dieci minuti fra field recordings e inserti elettronici, con un finale drone un po’ cupo. “Do que Ressoa” di Sara Pinheiro, invece, segue un incedere meno lineare, ma è ammantato dalla stessa vaga sensazione di oscurità, fino al climax finale.
“No Earlids” ha una struttura ancora più articolata e, insieme con “Splicing_archives”, vuole inserirsi in una narrazione volutamente straniante, perché la presa di coscienza non può che passare per lo shock e una profonda riflessione collettiva.
In questo senso, “Lisboa Soa – Sounds within Sounds” è un disco complesso e politico, che non può essere compreso realmente senza conoscerne le premesse e le idee alla base della sua creazione. (Piergiuseppe Lippolis)
Chi ha giocato al primo ”Silent Hill”? Un videogioco del 1999 che si incentra sull’orrore psicologico, in cui un uomo si ritrova in una città fantasma, dove accadono cose inquietanti nella nebbia. “Silent Hill” è stato apprezzato anche da David Lynch, tanto per dire che di che atmosfere parliamo.
Miguel A. García, che si fa chiamare anche Xedh, è un direttore artistico di eventi di musica sperimentale, come lo Zarata Fest. Vive a Bilbao, e qui ci porta nelle viscere del suono con “Eraginie”, uscito per Crónica Records, album formato da quattro tracce di field recording. Il primo brano, “Vri seg” ci ambienta in un ipotetico videogioco, ambientato fra detriti spaziali. Frammenti di materia che vagano nel vuoto.
Anche la successiva “Harmattans” è così, ma c’è un fluido costante, che funge da collante degli elementi. Non c’è ritmo, ma micropulsazioni che rendono dinamico lo sviluppo acustico. Nei 14 minuti, gradualmente, accadono tante cose diverse, verso la fine si sentono in lontananza tasti di pianoforte, in mezzo a segnali radiofonici. “Roh” è un fangoso assemblaggio di battiti, sembra di ascoltare un organismo vivente dal suo interno, nei processi chimici e cellulari. Infine, “Stellaire” ci riporta quel “fluido” del secondo brano, un liquido cristallino in mezzo a ceneri di rumori sbriciolati.
È un viaggio intenso, scorrere e lasciarsi scorrere da questi suoni. Un’esplorazione della materia, di cui siamo composti e circondati, tradotta per l’udito. (Gilberto Ongaro)
Another splendid work by Bruno Duplant, one of my current personal favourites of enigmatic and sometimes minimal composition. His Sombres Miroirs (CRONICA 188-2022) is, by his standards, positively teeming with activity and events, and in this floating richness we can hear everything from backwards orchestras to uncertain cosmic gyrations – planets spinning or nebulae drifting into the distance. Profound, too, are the thoughts of the composer himself who conceived and executed this fascinating suite in two parts; he muses, not without some melancholy, on such deep matters as nature, humanity, civilisation, and the fate of the planet. What perceptions does he come away with? “Dark in my eyes and embittered in my heart,” comes the stern reply. The overall effect of the composition isn’t intended to induce unhappiness, however, and he takes things as a cosmic cycle where “hope and despair [move] in ever-recurring successions”. More than once, these “dark mirrors” put me in mind of my beloved Ligeti, showing Duplant can successfully deliver the micro-tonal thing without straying into ambient gloop or soppy drone. I wonder if it really is orchestrated, or made with tapes and keyboards? Either way, a beautiful work for gazing into the abyss at the heart of everything. Glory be! (13/07/2022) Ed Pinsent
Quite nice short tape experiments from Morten Riis on his cassette Lad Enhver Lyd Minde Os Om(CRÓNICA 186-2022). He did it using modified four-track cassette recorders and his own home-made synths, although the press notes are a little short on specifics, and refer us to mysterious processes such as “media and the human-object participatory democracy”. I suppose this may mean something about the opportunities afforded by technology which have opened up his creative imagination to some degree. The main compositional device appears to be a form of layering, where he makes so many noises and textures that we can’t discern where the original tapes might have been sourced. A painter, blending colours on a canvas, may hope for similar results. There’s a muffled and disjointed quality to the results which is not unpleasant; the title refers obliquely to the possibility of one sound reminding us of something else. I like the brevity of these pieces, but the album doesn’t amount to much more than a series of sketches, vaguely suggestive of other possibilities. Riis comes to us from his studies at Aarhus, and has published on the subject of mediation in sound. (13/07/2022, Ed Pinsent)
Defining itself as a festival of sound art, ecology and auditory culture, Lisboa Soa seeks to value contemporary artistic creation, but assigning it a social and ecological context, of direct intervention in space, encouraging the participation of different audiences through installations and sound performances, auditory education workshops, debates, lectures and tours focused on the sense of hearing. The purpose of Lisboa Soa is to encourage listening to better understand the place we occupy, and to raise awareness of the impact of human presence on the planet.
Acoustic ecology, the discipline that inspired the festival since its foundation, places listening at the centre, and this is also the focus of Lisboa Soa: to shift attention to the ears and to create conditions, spatial and temporal, that are conducive to the act of listening attentively. One of the main goals of Lisboa Soa is to bring the audience to iconic spaces and create auditory experiences that guide visitors through these spaces, while at the same time provoking a reflection on the involvement of human beings with the environment, with others, with the city and how it all connects through sound.
In 2021, after five editions — one of them particularly intense, during a year of pandemic and restrictions — Lisboa Soa decided to “listen backwards”, commissioning four compositions to four Portuguese artists, who delved into the festival’s sound archive to create new interpretations and meanings from it. This album is created from these compositions: it is a work about memory, with an ear to the future.
Raquel Castro
João Castro Pinto started his activity as a composer and performer of experimental music and as a sound and intermedia artist in the second half of the 1990s. His production comprehends the domains of soundscape composition, live electronics improv, electroacoustic and acousmatic music and radio art. He graduated in Philosophy from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and is currently completing his PhD, on the composition of soundscapes, at the Portuguese Catholic University. agnosia.me
Efflux was composed through the sound exploration of the selected samples, favouring contrasting approaches. Some sounds were extremely processed, until they became unrecognisable, others were filtered and isolated from their environmental context, however, maintaining some of their spectromorphological profile, and, finally, sounds from concordant and discordant sound families were added. Efflux presents a varied sonic flow of frequencies, amplitude dynamics, between quasi-silence and dense volume, discrete and continuous sounds.
Sara Pinheiro is a sound designer for cinema and video art, acousmatic composition and multi-channel live performance. She graduated in Sound for Cinema at the School for Theatre and Cinema in Lisbon, and in Sonology at the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Her PhD, at the School of Music at Bangor University, crosses the areas of Concrete Music with sound design for cinema. She currently resides in Prague where she works as a sound designer and cultural agent, both as a member of the live coding group k-o-l-e-k-t-i-v and the “REGARDLESS” manifesto.
Do que Ressoa looks for the spaces of the meantime, the arrivals and departures before and after concerts/installations, the wait, the oscillation, the resonance of intermediate moments as in a temporal suspension of a memory that I do not have.
Mestre André works as a field-recordist, performer, composer and sound artist for film, dance, performance and theatre. He has composed electro-acoustic sound work for multi-channel systems under the alias O Morto, improvised electronic music as Alacrau and produced beats as Notwan. He works with the bands Jibóia and Banha da Cobra. André is a beekeeper involved in the ecological thinking of aesthetics in natural contexts, his work reflects on an ecological thinking of creative practice and aesthetic relationships within natural human and nonhuman contexts. Within this subject, he recently published the article “Towards a Rewilding of the Ear” in the Organized Sound journal and has been developing the installation series Dwelling Poetics of Dystopia.
No Earlids is the (de)compositional result of sounds from various editions of Lisboa Sounds through the ears that recorded them. The de-composition process was entrusted to intuition in choosing moments from among dozens of hours of recording with the aid of the memory of the moments themselves. Not only intentional moments but also “backstage” moments, in an indiscriminate listening, without blinking.
Ana Guedes lives and works between Portugal and the Netherlands. Her artistic practice explores the plasticity of sound in formats such as performance and installation, interconnecting temporalities and narratives, archival notions, historical, social and political perspectives. Ana Guedes attended the Calouste Gulbenkian Music Conservatory in Braga, graduated in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, obtained a Masters in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, in the Netherlands.
Splicingarchives integrates fragments of Lisboa Soa’s archive of sound performances. Performances from different editions of the festival are referenced, coexisting as fragments of different filtered voices, processed using analogue tape loops, synthesisers and pipe organ, recorded in the analogue music laboratories Willem Twee Studios in The Netherlands. Jen Reimer & Max Stein (2017), Tomoko Sauvage (2018), Santa Melódica Orchestra (2019), Ana Guedes & Lisboa Soa archives, organ+ tape loops + synth (2021-2023).
“Lisboa Soa, Sounds Within Sounds” is now available as a limited-release CD, download, or stream from Crónica.
Crónica bringen Ende des Monats eine CD mit vier Tracks heraus, die das portugiesische Festival Lisboa Soa in den Jahren von 2016 – 2020 dokumentieren. Vertreten sind Ana Guedes, João Castro Pinto, Mestre André und Sara Pinheiro – vier Vertreterinnen und Vertreter der einheimischen Experimentalszene, die als Komponisten, Soundesigner- und Performer in verschiedenen Kontexten aktiv sind und mit ganz unterschiedlichen Klangmaterialien arbeiten.
Die vorliegenden Arbeiten basieren auf Mitschnitten aus den Archiven des Festivals. Diese wurden 2021, als pandemiebedingt erstmals kein Festival abgehalten werden konnte, einer gründlichen Revision und Neuinterpretation unterzogen und in die hier zu hörenden Formen gebracht. Mit seinen den Raum bewusst einbeziehenden Performances, Workshops und zum Teil environmentartigen Installationen gibt Lisboa Soa den künstlerischen Arbeiten eine räumliche und damit zusammenhängend auch soziale und ökologische Dimension. Dies betont auch die Kuratorin Raquel Castro, die auch als Herausgeberin der Compilation fungiert, in ihren Liner Notes: “The purpose of Lisboa Soa is to encourage listening to better understand the place we occupy, and to raise awareness of the impact of human presence on the planet. Acoustic ecology, the discipline that inspired the festival since its foundation, places listening at the centre, and this is also the focus of Lisboa Soa: to shift attention to the ears and to create conditions, spatial and temporal, that are conducive to the act of listening attentively. One of the main goals of Lisboa Soa is to bring the audience to iconic spaces and create auditory experiences that guide visitors through these spaces, while at the same time provoking a reflection on the involvement of human beings with the environment, with others, with the city and how it all connects through sound.
In 2021, after five editions — one of them particularly intense, during a year of pandemic and restrictions — Lisboa Soa decided to “listen backwards”, commissioning four compositions to four Portuguese artists, who delved into the festival’s sound archive to create new interpretations and meanings from it. This album is created from these compositions: it is a work about memory, with an ear to the future”. Neben der CD ist “Lisboa Soa, Sounds Within Sounds” auch zum Download erhältlich.
A festival of sound art, ecology and auditory culture. That’s how Lisboa Soa is described, and they have been going since 2016. To commemorate the first lustrum, they opened their archives to four Portuguese musicians and had them create new works from works collected. The festival is about “acoustic ecology, the discipline that inspired the festival since its foundation, places listening at the centre, and this is also the focus of Lisboa Soa: to shift attention to the ears and to create conditions, spatial and temporal, that are conducive to the act of listening attentively. One of the main goals of Lisboa Soa is to bring the audience to iconic spaces and create auditory experiences that guide visitors through these spaces while at the same time provoking a reflection on the involvement of human beings with the environment, with others, with the city and how it all connects through sound”, so in that sense, it is a good idea to create new connections and new spaces. Of these four, I only heard of João Castro Pinto but not Sara Pinheiro, Meste André and Ana Guedes. These four composers have four different approaches. At the start, Pinto uses highly varied sounds from the works, processes these heavily and uses silence quite a bit, in powerful contrast to other sounds he uses. Pinheiro concentrates on the actions in between, before and after a concert, the auditorium and everybody waiting. There is no emphasis on the dynamics within the sound, but minor differences exist in the sounds of empty spaces. André’s approach is ‘What do I like that much that I want to use it?’, sounds from the concerts and behind the scenes (which made me think, what is archived here, and how much?). His piece is quite the traditional musique concrète approach, working with granulating sound, collage-like and most enjoyable throughout. It is also the one piece that uses recognizable musical instruments: lots of percussion and some trumpet. Each piece is longer than the previous, but from the fourteen of André, it is a leap to the twenty-five of Guedes. She uses the archive but adds recordings from other places, such as Willem Twee Studios in The Netherlands. It is a long piece, but there are very beautifully arranged atmospheric sounds here, at times almost drone-like. (FdW)
Crónica veröffentlichen dieser Tage einnen neuen Longplayer des baskischen Komponisten und Soundartist Miguel A. García mit vier ausladenden Tracks, basierend auf Field Recordings und anderem klanglichen Rohmaterial, bei denen eine Reihe weiterer Personen – Pedro A. Mirones, Maite Mugerza (von der auch die im Artwork verwendeten Zeichnungen stammen), Garazi Navas, Schahram Poursoudmand, Alex Reviriego, Jeff Surak – ihren Teil beigesteuert haben. In seinem Begleittext geht Fernando Ulzión auf die Abkehr des Musikers von einer lange gepflegten Lofi-Ästhetik ein und kommt auf die Verschiedenartigkeit im Bau der feinsinnig gestalteten Stücke zu sprechen: “In the stillness we touch the eternal? With this new edition, Miguel A. García definitively abandons the low fidelity of his early work to give detritus, error and acoustic waste a luxury treatment that is recommended to be heard in good equipment. Just as before we heard their disturbing worlds from afar, we intuited them, now we are in there, we are the very central nucleus; we are part of it. What used to come from outside now comes from within. The remnants of light are brighter than ever.
The most blinding darkness. Quite simply: the first piece begins with the sounds of a field recording of a hypothetical space junk video game that, in an alien environment, organizes itself into a musical symphony, takes shape and organizes itself according to a logic of elusive masses. The following theme shares with the first the lack of a marked regular rhythm, but instead they do have their tempo, their internal rhythm, their cadence based on micro-rhythms and sequences and frequencies, which make them not static but enormously dynamic. A liquid, mercurial nature (cold, but a good electrical conductor); constantly changing; an apparently imperceptible but profound metamorphosis. On the other hand, the third theme opens with a mixture of the most unusual rhythms, a bizarre dance session in crescendo; psycho-electroacoustic dance. To close the cycle, the fourth piece brings us the melody seen through a hundred thousand veils, as sensual and seductive as elusive and painful. The dissolution of all that is solid, the eternal and unstoppable dissolution of matter and its return to nothing”. García, der auch unter dem Namen Xedh aktiv ist, hat in den letzten gut anderthalb Jahrzehnten eine Vielzahl an Aufnahmen in den unterschiedlichsten Formaten herausgebracht, neben Soloarbeiten umfasst dies auch Kollaborationen und Bands. “Eraginie” erscheint am 5. September auf CD und zum Download.
