"A collective live improvisation planned, performed and recorded in the first edition of the event Onda Phuturista, at the Galeria Paciência (Patience Gallery) on January 12th, 2020. One year, one month and one day after that, on 13/02/2021, the album "12 de Janeiro, 2020 – Antesdurantedepois"
Musicians in Ensemble Phuturista are:
George Christian – acoustic-electric guitar, electric guitar
Heitor Dantas – live electronics, samplers
Maria Phuturista – vocals (track 3 and 4)
Talionpills – voice and electronics (tracks 3 and 4)
Fernando Fernandes – percussion and drums
Vítor Rios – banjo,
André Miranda Filho – cello, electric bass,
Paulo Roberto Pitta – tenor saxophone
https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/12-de-janeiro-2020-antesdurantedepois
Reducing as translating. as exploding or scattering. describing a multi-media experience, portraying it in words, is almost as difficult as recording it. harrowing the illusion of any recording. bringing the real thing to you via the real-thing medium, the vibrating cone, the flashy image. no images here. only the vibrating speaker cones. brain decodes breath, people, tumult, a room, the guitar plays a figure, another guitar (or a loop of the same guitar -- one can't see --). the notes say there's banjo. is that a tinny banjo I hear? no way to be sure. drums: they weave under and crest up occasionally against the guitar, incessantly honking like a car-horn but perhaps guided by something the player is watching, the steps of a dancer perhaps. some moaning voices, a horn perhaps, a bowed simulacrum of a horn, the cello below the bridge. a reed enters very confident and off color from the rest, forcing the others into response, they bend up, or disappear. cricketty tapping of percussion. some voice. at the bar, on the street, in the cafe, in the mind. toy horns, bugles, samples according to my decoding apparatus. a guitar arpeggio. categorization and identification of sounds become mentally draining. but the dark and mellow figure played on the cello takes the mind away from left brain calculation. then it disappears in a wave pulling back. finally an image emerges: a harbor, vessels bobbing in the surf, waves, people shouting directions, wires clanking on poles, whining of wood against docks, barrels rolling down planks, birds, sirens. then the image vanishes. small percussion flourishes and samples.
I read the notes and see details concerning the event, a gallery, two rooms, visual art, performance, things I can only guess about and not experience here while listening. Does the absence of multi-dimensional things mean anything? At certain moments, no, at certain moments the sound carries something on it's own, even if it's quite lo-fi, in the second track, there is brooding cello, orchestral samples, sound chunks heave like wreckage of ships floating in storm winds, slashing guitar, purely elemental forces.
At other times one feels in the presence of a film set where the actors have not entered the frame yet, the illusion of the music creating a scenario for something that for them is there and for the listener something they must supply with fantasies.
Into the third track a desolate deserted blues wrangling hollers at the moon, guitar and saxophone as if two different canine species howling for the lost pack, a bass figure moving in figures, notes, it takes some thinking to resolve, a drum pulse starts to pick up the pace and a lumbering pattern provides the support for the various solos, until they break down, the figure picked up by the banjo and the entry of pitch-shifted dwarfish voices until at moments it sounds a bit like a wild party jam to "while my guitar gently weeps" played by the voidoids and the vocals of a acid-drenched bootsy's rubberband had walked in off the street to manifest their funk. then there is a howling feedback break down with the drums trashing out metallic dirges and high pitches voices manifesting their funk and a general swamping swirl of noises for some time before new guiding vectors of glissandi appear and a sandstorm begins. impossible to see what's happening. a voice, apparently female, speaks, there's mumbling all around, pitch-shifted, chorus: a sudden reorganization, a drum-roll energy picks up the pace...then it fades out. reading the notes again one learns this was originally a 3-hour event. the recording has been edited. the build up again of whirlwinds of sound become oriented around a repeated pattern in bass and intensification by the drumming sending it to a peak, throbbing via very dramatic, dark, gothic psychedelic vibe the voice chanting and eventually it all retards into some arpeggiated banjo or perhaps electric keyboard until there comes, abruptly, but fittingly, the end, with applause.
what I haven't said already I won't be able to say again. what I heard seems to be the exciting search of a large ensemble for a mutual cooperative language of some kind. guided by some scripted frameworks. the notes describe it all more accurately from the point of view of one of the players. the phrase he uses is worth repeating "a great mutant sound enigma from the urban tropics". what I admire most is the collective energy and genuinely explorative nature of the players, all of whom seem to have skills and listening abilities. the recording points us to a social event, a happening, taking place before the pandemia displaced all such activities, if not dismantling their possibility for ever. something to think about for the moment as the world forces of control and conservative steering of the manufactured reality postpones acts of resistance and creative being togetherness. time to take back the stages. first step is to become immunologically sound.
-- Jeff Gburek, 2/15/2021
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