Buy Digital Album - sirr-ecords.bandcamp.com/album/v-sceras-contradan-as


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An introduction by Marco Scarassatti:

When I listen to Thelmo Cristovam's music, I imagine his figure going out into the field and carrying a suitcase full of microscopes, magnifying glasses, telescopes and a telescope, in addition to the glasses that wear his eyes. However, these different lenses are your microphones, which together with the recording modes, work as prostheses to create the music that your listening investigates.
Physics, mathematics and art are found in this independent, empiricist, fruitful and circumspect researcher / artist whose name and work are unavoidable when trying to contextualize experimental music made in Brazil, from the 2000s to here.

When thinking about the collection of the important albums that make up the emerging sound of the 2000s, of what today we call Brazilian experimental music, when one reads the technical data of these works, one realizes that they are related to the v(g)erme home studio, in Olinda. In reality, this alchemical studio is not configured as a place, but as the investigative / artistic presence of Thelmo and his prosthesis bag to record the world.

From the albums of the group Hrönir - a powerful encounter between him and Túlio Falcão, who lit the wick of the electroacoustic lamp of Brazilian experimentalism - to solo projects, partnerships with other artists, field recordings, what can be seen in this multiplicity of investigations is that , on the one hand Thelmo points to a preference for non-human, synthetic sounds or noise generators, on the other hand, he seeks the forest, nature, the world as a source of sound generation in itself. He speaks in past listening as if the sound of the distant in time could be accessed by listening to the uninhabited place. It accomplishes this, each job is a listening project.

The album Vísceras / Contradanças, is part of this set of investigations from microscopic to macroscopic relationships with sound, listening and recording modes, which characterizes the work of Thelmo Cristovam. Its release occurs 15 years after the release of ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ, first of the albums released in which Thelmo, explored the internal sounds of a wind instrument, in this case the C-melody saxophone, in a solistical way. With the same poiesis, works like O enforcado (Amor Loco, 2008), for trumpet and Trombone (originally released in 2007 and re-released by Seminal Records, 2014) follow.

Vísceras / Contradanças, it is a plunge into the bowels of the saxophone, as if it were one of his soundscapes, in appearing to precede the recording a long silence and listening. Here, listening is released as a breath that animates the instrument's body in the exploration of the extended techniques and in the physical-acoustic relations resulting from it. It is in this breath that the circumspect expressiveness of Thelmo is perceived, in his way of playing and improvising on the instrument as a sound source, or as an environmental biome.

Thelmo Cristovam is a singular figure in Brazilian sound art and musical experimentalism. This album, as well as his other works, seems to be an emblem that brings together ways of making, from crafts to technologies used as artifacts, in the construction of a poetic sound space.