Marco Scarassatti - sound sculptures & self made instruments
Eduardo Chagas - trombone & objects
Gloria Damijan - piano, inside toy piano & objects
Abdul Moimême - electric guitar & objects

cs332

Greek tragedies commence with a distant rumour; an
untraceable sound, a vibration without a presence, the
prelude to an announcement. A predicted form, not yet
present, that doesn’t reveal itself with clarity, an indistinguishable
breath that sums up the inexactness of the sound in
defining something perchance decisive: the advance of an
invading army, an atmospheric clatter, the devastation of a
plague… something lurking, that is revealed as an undefined
formula of disquiet, as dangerous as it is unseen.
Sight, the form of Apollo, brings order and thus protects us.
The ear, when educated by norms, assists order as well as the
control of predictable outcomes; even though Dionysius may
reside in these, heedful of the non-measurable forces of the
world, the indefiniteness of the senses inserts us in a region
where unpredictability is the law. In essence, a rumour is a
sound whose source deceives us, a vibration regarding which
we receive the mode of its expansion well before its very
announcement, bothering, upsetting our control concerning
where, when and from what direction something inevitable is
presented before us. The forms of Apollo, clarity and control,
distinction and exactitude, support geometrically what one
expects from the world; facing them, a rumour is an acousmatic
sound whose source is unknown, enclosing itself blindly; it
inaugurates a space where terror nests in the entirety of its
extent, from the incommode to the dreadful, from the sublime
to the insane, between the difficult and the annoying; lying
exactly at the most intense source from which art springs. Art
is about the olfaction of possibilities, an imagined foretelling.
Opposed to what we know – “an enemy rumour” – as the poet
Lezama would say, norms become subjected to stress, they
must be exposed to tension; what we know is no longer
sufficient to protect ourselves, making it necessary to
commence inspecting; imagining the paths through which a
threat can reach us. That unattainable place, where neither the
eye nor the ear can reach, must be imagined by means of
illusion, a fundamentally prospective tool, a truly human
shuttle, projected across the yarn in search of other rhythms,
other routes, other possibilities, other forms.
At the onset, tragedy is proclaimed by a terrifying distant
thunder which advances against the city; a soundtrack that
disfigures presences. In addition, the rumour’s form must
create particular organs with which to present itself: the guitar
is prepared to disconcert its own exactitude, similarly as the
remaining components of the group, orgiastically united in a
chronographic ceremony – in other words, in shared time –
were they dance and engage conjointly in order to urge
forward other intensities, other non-measurable magnitudes,
unpredicted, sensationally provoking other measures, other
means of sensing the rhythm of the world. “He who does not
expect will not ascertain the unexpected”, thus Heraclitus’
acousmatics defines the space disclosed by rumour. The
instruments mentioned abandon clarity and distinction, such
Cartesian tools as utilised to investigate the horizon. They must
embrace the world, composed of inconsistencies, where time
reveals itself with redoubled virulence; the capacity to
progress (as well as regress), in any direction. Works of art, such
as rumours, at no time begin or end as they act neither sequentially
nor consequently. A sound isn’t disposed, either
expectantly or in linear dialogue with the following sound.
Quite the otherwise, they assist the tidal weaving of a
soundtrack, incrementing against each fragile centre. Each
performer beholds not the sequence and its logic; what he
witnesses is the scope of available possibilities and the
construction of another time that is shared; without attending
to the expected rhythms, the cordial or human ones, geometric
and repetitive, rhythmic or pulsated. All those ‘fingerings’,
which one previously considered as ‘suspicious’, are now
preferred to a fixed pulse or pulsation: glissandi, tearing,
rubbing, scratching, gurgling, murmuring, scrubbing, making
bubbles, vapor… graphic metamorphoses of rumour.
Gestures made not to yield clarity but rather to evoke an
atmosphere of relationships, always located between two
points, never still and at no time definitive.
Instruments reclaim their playful origin, as toys, anthropologically
speaking; they juggle with the norms, alongside the sonic
ritual. The ritual disposes the players, distributes and designs
their roles and tools, handing out the a priori that blend them
together, participating in the interchange; only to retire when
the game and the unforeseeable that may result commence. It
fosters. The instruments have been tuned for the game: their
profiles have been blurred in order to avoid the clear and the
measureable, they have lost their frets, their forms and
formulas have been modified, or they use their edges beyond
the possibility of technical control. They become engulfed in
each detail that might have otherwise been discarded only to
be conferred with a renewed value and perspective; they
manage to amplify, increment the complexity into a finer
discourse (formosus, filled with forms), converting it into a
flow, impulse, sphere of signs and meanings. The instruments
have stopped delivering clear and calculated pitches, as they
would serving Apollo, contrarily they gurgle, breath, slide,
screech, growl, thunder, vibrate with gravity, they swing
suspended in time, they dance and listen, not to the sequence
and line of the other musicians' dialogue but rather to time
and global space of the piece; the ritual's proposal is both to
play within and alongside these elements. For the participants
the final result is unknown, which happens to be a basic norm
and interest of any game and is something the players
propitiate and expect. The players will always surprise
themselves with the process, which in turn functions as an
invaluable referential marker allowing the game to proceed,
as they adjust their instruments as diffusers of possibilities
rather than as definers of meanings.
The rite of sound proposes a meeting, a ceremony of play. In
turn, the game provides the pleasure of the experiment, the
danger, the possibility of work with tools that function like
viruses, illuminating with what we already know areas that
have not yet been explored. Expanded instruments,
capturing a fragment of time with the purity or the threat that
it will not be contained by our predictions: for Abdul
Moimême, an extended guitar, mediated throughout its
pick-ups and architectural ambiences… for Eduardo Chagas,
a trombone full of clipped glissandi, orthographically
rhythmic, through the use of objects… for Gloria Damijan, a
grand piano transformed into a toy piano, where roles are
festively interchanged, not by means of technique or power
but rather by means of a fundamental vibration, Dionysian,
elementary and wild… for Marco Scarassatti, instruments
created within an eyelet of the accepted norms, sound
sculptures conceived as antennae, where inexactness is
substituted by the revolutionary power of caprice, a nude
form of experimentation…
Rumour, as anticipation, doesn’t advance; it shows us a
condensed time, dense; it introduces us into time that is open
to other durations, in a Diaspora of new sensations, in the
wonder and delight of novel territories where beauty
includes an infinitude of nuances that span both abandonment
as well as the expansion of the human body into
non-human rhythms.

Miguel Copón

Note: ‘Rumor’ is the Portuguese word for rumour.