serra da estrela diaries #00: artistic residency in Portugal

On February 2016, I start an artistic residency in Portugal to write a new mixed electroacoustic work, blending acoustic musical instruments with electronic sounds. 

In a project funded by the Ibermúsicas, I will be hosted by the Festival Dias de Música Eletroacústica, based in Conservatório de Música de Seia, a small town in the heart of the Serra da Estrela mountains. Despite its diminute size, Seia displays an intense musical life. Collaborating with local instrumentalists in the conception of the new work and creating the electroacoustic part of the piece in the institution's octophonic studio will be complemented with the chance to mingle in the local musical scene, showing around some of my work as a composer in concerts, talks and workshops.

Right away in the first week of my stay I play in the Festival DME 26|44, which takes place from 6th to 9th February and unites an interesting team of artists: Antez (FR), Steve Hubbacke (UK), the João Pais Filipe, Gustavo Costa and Henrique Fernandes (PT), as well as Agustin Castilla-Ávila (SP).

In February 5th, I speak in the EIMAD - Encontro de Investigação em Música, Artes e Design about "The reivindication of the body in musical composition", in which I discuss aspects of musical composition involving the body and comment on my recent work.

During this residency, this website will be used to post news about the new work's creative process and other musical adventures in Portugal. More news are soon to come.

deCapitu, the movie

January 21st 2016, 20h, Mário de Andrade Library, São Paulo is the première of deCapitu, an audiovisual work created together with filmmaker Alexandre Charro, featuring actresses Liliana Junqueira and Melany Kern.

This audiovisual project started in 2013 as a commission from NME for the NMElança label. It explores elements of the novel Dom Casmurro by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis via an experimental and contemporary language, resulting from a long process initiated in 2010. I started experimenting the first vocal scores with Liliana and Melany as soundtrack studies for the theatrical play Capitu Desterrada, by the group Sociedade Baderna de Teatro e Outros Atentados, directed by Pedro Mantovani. In 2011, these scores were assembled in an autonomous work for two actresses and quadraphonic electronic sounds as a commission for the festival Conexões Sonoras 2, organized by Ibrasotope. The partnership with Alexandre Charro was established in 2013 and we started to work out the performatic and audiovisual material until it reached its present form.

Being 40 minutes long and subdividen in six chapters plus an electroacoustic intermezzo, this movies does not present the romantic misfortune Bento and Capitolina. It rather confronts us with a voice that has been silenced for more than one century by a suspect narrator, whose sweet talking been making us accomplices of a narrative construction of jealousy that is close to paranoid perversion. In its sound and image conceptios, deCapitu avoids any accusatory attitude as it takes into account the concretude of punishment inflicted to the female character in the novel: with no rights of defence or appelation Capitu finishes the romance in exhile, dead and buried in Switzerland, being of less importance the fact that the betrayal accusations made by the narrator remain fanciful and with no evidence. deCapitu chooses to embodie the voice of this character that struggles to overcome the only thing she knows for sure: that her defeat is implicit in the game's rules.