Sétima Legião’s album Sexto Sentido, might be the first album in Portuguese music history that attempted to fuse ethnomusicology with electronic music. It is a fascinating record that pioneered experimentalism in the country and prayed tribute to an everlasting musical and sound culture. Rodrigo Leão is the personality behind the concept of this album, a musician recognized to be a post-rock artist with records like A um Deus Desconhecido (1984) where can be found tracks like Glória who gained a lot of success in the ’80s or even De um Tempo Ausente (1989) with a more popular approach and reached national popularity with the depressive pop-rock song Por Quem Não Esqueci.
The band Sétima Legião used several themes extracts of Portuguese traditional music, but never with the same caliber that Sexto Sentido has. In the album, several samples from recordings taken in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s by the sound artist and ethnomusicologist Michel Giacometti can be found arranged in different manners. The idea was to leave them as pristine as possible, so the voices and sounds reproduced maintained their fidelity to its original recording. The voices of labor singing obtained a new life and destiny in this approach, eternalizing their legacy. Although several songs sounded too ambitious, the album outcome is extraordinary and makes any Portuguese artist proud. For them might have been complicated to change their register tremendously.
Many fans of the band criticized their work for being “too different” because they were not expecting this side experimental side of the band. They switched from pop-rock to Electronic-Ambient -Trip Hop-Folk Music. For me, this could be also a reinterpretation of the future by using the past as a reference and served as inspiration for my sound piece.