cesura

Ernesto Rodrigues | Alfredo Costa Monteiro | Guilherme Rodrigues | Margarida Garcia | cs008

Cesura is a Portuguese word which refers both to the act of cutting and to the scar that very same act produces. Cause and effect, simultaneously. Should you want to play with this ambivalence of the word and you could say the scar was already there before the cutting - which introduces a small yet significant perversion into the only apparent sequential logic of how things happen in our world: so, after all, now effect can anticipate cause.
Worthless is arguing that each effect is the cause of the next effect, trying to establish a never-ending chain or a finite one only when the last and terrible cause is reached - because life, truly, is no simple and continuous sequence of movements and framed facts.
All sequences that surround and bear us are constantly being broken.
With the momentum History has achieved these last two centuries, the more these cuttings have come to happen, cuttings over sequences (Trotskyism with the idea of permanent revolution tried to introduce a sequence on a cutting but obviously failed to do so), but also cuttings over cuttings (which the aesthetics of television illustrates perfectly).
It comes as no surprise that in these times of ultra sophisticated armament a fetishism over the knife as come to develop. All over the world statistics are impressive as far as murder with blade weapons is concerned.
The same way it is no surprise at all that in literature, thinking and arts, the notion of gap, rupture, cut has become a fundamental idea since Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists. So it happens in this cd which gathers such talents as Ernesto Rodrigues, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Guilherme Rodrigues and  Margarida Garcia. This is a work inspired in a very particular way by the procedures of cesura in poetry, with a reference to the initial part of and to the characteristic pause in Alexandrine verse.
This music is cut with a flick knife over the surface of silence which is why Ernesto boasts that this is his “least musical” work. Each stab of sound, each sudden construction dug into the sequentiality is a mark left in time and a move, a gesture, against inertia. A poetry of remainings, in a word. Cold and clinical, maybe, but of cutting humanity.
 

Rui Eduardo Paes - (journalist and music writer)