Raul Azevedo Ramos – Page 10 – Ⓡⓐⓤⓛ 'ⓢ Ⓢⓞⓤⓝⓓ Ⓙⓞⓤⓡⓝⓐⓛ

⁽ᵛⁱˢⁱᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᵖʳᵃᶜᵗⁱᵗⁱᵒⁿᵉʳˢ⁾ ᴰᵉᶠᵒʳʳᵉˢᵗ ᴮʳᵒʷⁿ ᴶʳ. ⁻ ᴿᵉʷʳⁱᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᵀᵉᶜʰⁿᵒ ᴴⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ

DeForrest Brown Jr. started his research on American Techno Music around 2009/10. He recently co-developed a project called Make Techno Black Again, where he celebrates the genre’s origins. Throughout the class, DeForrest explained the context of his project and shadowed the history of black people on techno music. He used the city of Detroit as a case of study that could be applied to the rest of the United States:

Detroit is a Settler colonial Industrial Capitalist State run on human labour exclusively and uses the land itself as a resource to fuel itself. (…) You can’t separate Detroit Techno from the rest of Detroit Music. The music from this city is century-long continuous thought that was disrupted by various points by white supremacist violence. He later jumps to a chart designed by the collectors and techno duo Drexciya, consisting of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, made in 1997 for their upcoming album The Quest, where they explain the relationship between the primitive slave market in the XVII century to modern and cultural aspects of techno music. DeForrest explains how and when Detroit was founded: in the American territory expansion (a period recognized for many wars inside the existing country or its borders, such as the Mexican American War or even the American Civil War) gold in the now Californian State. That same gold was the firestarter to build the New World in the USA, being Detroit one of the cities built in that era, becoming one of the most industrious cities to ever exist. Following his research, the American Civil War was a matter of slaveocracy, where the north and south were fighting to maintain slavery. According to DeForrest Brown, Abraham Lincoln was not fully planning to free the slaves and make black people as equal as white American because there were quotes where the same clarified the need for a separate living between the two (blacks and blacks whites). This might not be something relevant to techno music yet, but it’s a slow build-up into the conditions under which a 19-year-old black kid in the middle of a city that’s crumbling under the weight of its own bloated excess and arrogance.

The second image on the graph provided by Drexciya shows the migration, from the south to the north, of black people in the ’30s and ’40s due to white supremacist violence. He uses the example of Sun Ra music, which is a response from the place he was from – he moved from Alabama to New York. He also refers to the Bombingham incident in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan bombed a church, making 4 girls dead. I should say that my aunt, the daughter of my Great Grandfather, was supposed to be the fifth young girl in this bombing, but that day just so happened to move to Detroit that morning. That’s my personal connection to Detroit – understanding why black ended up North. These types of violent white supremacists manifestations happened in many other industrialize ecosystems where both blacks and whites couldn’t live together, which inducted a series of riots at the end of the ’60s, after the death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, to protest against these adversities.

According to Alvin Toffler’s perspective of western society, the ’80s was essentially a part of the Information Era. The Detroit High Tec Music appeared, being it a response to the city’s history in the modern days.

Make Techno Black Again also reflects on how black culture was kept being stolen from them and appropriated by white Americans throughout history and how that has to do with European colonialism and systemic music industries. What colonialism are many white men who start businesses without having concrete rules and conversations about distributing what they’re calling products? It’s not even about techno, it’s literally about stopping colonialism, and our weapon of choice, for now, is music and counterculture, said Brown Jr to HoneySuckle magazine.

(ᵛⁱˢⁱᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᵖʳᵃᶜᵗⁱᵗⁱᵒⁿᵉʳˢ) ᴷʰʸⁱᵃᵐ ᴬˡˡᵃᵐⁱ ⁻ ᵃ ᵇᵒᵈʸ, ᵃ ᵗᵘⁿⁿⁱⁿᵍ ˢʸˢᵗᵉᵐ

Khyiam Allami is a musician and composer and primarily plays the oud, a middle-east instrument. He grew up in London, and firstly he was dedicated to punk rock music. Sometimes people assume that I only care about traditional music, but Khyiam presented us with something that proved that wrong in this lecture. I may be happier when I listen to an oud recording, but I’m also very inspired by stuff such as David Bowie or Autechre. He believes that ethnic and contemporary music live are two things that go in parallel lines. His interest in electronic music and digital tools got him to spot a big dilemma for him – tunning.

Tunning can be an intervenient for imposing a music culture because it represents something exclusive or unique. People tune the oud is not the same as people tune a guitar in the western world. Every time he tried to write an idea down in the DAW, he came across a barrier that didn’t allow him to compose, even after attempting to program it. What is available to us in most digital tools today is something called equal temperament – it’s a musical tunning system that approximates just intervals by dividing an octave into identical steps – something that is very representative of the Western Music Theory. Allami goes further on this perspective by referring to Phytagoras work on linking music with mathematics.

Pythagorean hammers

According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras made a fundamental discovery after observing that the hammers being used by blacksmiths in town made a ringing sound when striking iron. He realized that the weight of two hammers bore a simple numerical relationship to each other.

Although this legend states a discovery made by the Greek scientist, the Mesopotamians already had explored this thought. There are clay tablets that show a tunning system for a liar, dated 2500 B.C. A thousand years later, there is evidence of a Chinese system using bamboo panpipes. Pythagoras came in a thousand years later, and the only documented procedures came in the Euclid era in 300 A.C.

I mentioned Pythagoras to show this reverence in using the Greek Civilization as the only source of wisdom and thinking in the world. The others are only considered to be contributors, or sometimes they are not even mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zgFlE596q8

As Khyiam goes on, these ideas might be inoffensive at all, but when these systems are pre-established on the tools that we get used to making music, it insinuates that there’s only a good way of doing it right.

With this thinking process came the question:

How can I use my tunning system?

In the beginning, he developed many tools, but all of them failed to fulfil his expectations towards music production. He enrolled in a Bachelor in ethnomusicology at SOAS (University of London). If you know a different language, you know that it is about the grammatical theory and how to communicate with other people daily with different dialects, and music culture is the same. Around 2011-2012, he travelled a lot in the middle-east, especially in Cairo and Istanbul, and he started a band called Alif – the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. It was formed by himself (oud), Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (vocals/buzuq), Bashar Farran (Bass), Maurice Louca (Keys/Electronics), and Khaled Yassine (Drums/Percussion).

One of the biggest dilemmas that Alif came across was integrating contemporary digital sound into their work. On their debut album, the recording went very well, but the later production was very disappointing to them, as they had to retune most of the instruments that were tuned in the western way, such as the bass. A few years later, he got back with synthesizers with the premise of trying to imagine how and what could Arab music be? He used Max for Live plugins to tune the synthesizers by adjusting specific parameters. He thought that once he got that done, he would face the various capabilities and possibilities of Arab music. Instead, he reached a massive anticlimax. We need to feel some sense of agency in music to feel good about what we do, and Khyiam couldn’t extract anything from what he accomplished with Max for Live. He decided to relisten to every demo he made on that device and figured that most of them sounded very pastiche – they sounded like things he usually relates to in electronic music (Terry Riley and Depeche Mode). So, he enrolled in PhD at the Birmingham Conservatoire, focusing only on contemporary experimental Arabic music and understanding what guided him to this pastiching thinking. During this investigation, another revelation came in: he could not accomplish and finish an Arabic experimental electronic piece but instead sought creative freedom. This might sound a little bit cheesy and naive, but I had to rethink everything I was doing when I realized this. Apotame is then the project of all this self-reflection.

Apotame, is a transcultural browser-based generative music system focused on using microtonal tuning systems and subsets (scales/modes). It was created by Khyam Allami and Counterpoint and launched at CTM 2021 “transformation.”

https://ctm.isartum.net/

⁽ᵛⁱˢⁱᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᵖʳᵃᶜᵗⁱᵗⁱᵒⁿᵉʳ⁾ ᵗᵃᵗˢᵘʸᵃ ᵗᵃᵏᵃʰᵃˢʰⁱ ⁻ ᵇʳⁱⁿᵍⁱⁿᵍ ˢʸⁿᵗʰᵉˢⁱˢ ᵗᵒ ᵗʰᵉ ᵐᵃˢˢᵉˢ

In the previous visiting practioner lecture, I had the opportunity to research the legacy of Tatsuya Takahashi’s on the world of synthesizers and music technology. It was unbelievable for me that he is considerably young and yet made a significant impact in electronic music. The way he talks disarms his professional aura in a way that makes you feel you are interviewing a youngster that is about to apply to college. Tatsuya introduced himself by throwing two ways of talking about one’s life: the selfish and capitalist. He went with the first one, allowing himself to contemplate his capitalist view of his life sporadically.

You know, I’m a boring middle-class guy born in 1982, in Shizuoka, Japan, where Mount Fuji is. He left Japan to Frankfurt at a very young age, and later to London, for all you Londoners, you know zone 6 isn’t London. I had no choice where I grew up, said while describing the middle-class suburban area where he lived with his family for a long time. That lifestyle allowed him to become what he understood as a geek, staying all day at his workshop in his garage, where he built his first speakers as a kid. He made his first synthesizer at the age of 15 – I was a proud geek. For me, he was a hyperactive kid who learned so much by wanting to do a lot – an ADHD young prodigy. At that age, he taught himself about electronics, acoustic engineering, and many other things that “you are not supposed to do with 15”. Looking back to myself with that same age, I can only remember the many hours spent with my friends playing Minecraft, and which they now make me feel inadequate compared to Tsatsuya’s adolescence. Although, when discussing his moving to college to study general engineering, he said: “my course was so boring, your’s way cooler. You all are way cooler than me”. He specialized in analogue electronics to keep up with his passion for electronic music and synthesizer building.

Tatsuya Takahahsi at the age of 15 showcasing his first self-designed speakers

At the end of his course, he first came with the idea to later change the perspective over music-making and electronic music practices. He wanted to make the process more accessible. With all the digital era swelling the analogue era, he came up with his first-ever portable synthesizer, which came with a strip band intended to use as an acoustic guitar. But, because his achievements wouldn’t take him that far, he “sold” his idea to a proper job at Korg’s in Tokyo. The company finally heard all his aspirations and beliefs towards synthesizers, and throughout the ’10s, he would release the following apparatus under his name:

2009: MicroKorg XL (digital)
2010: Monotron (pocket size analogue synth)
2011: Monotribe (bigger and louder)
2013: Volca’s (finished state of his first synth)
2014: Synth Kit for kids and education
2015: MS-20
2016: Arp Odyssey
2016: First Keyboard Product that he comes up with – Minilogue Polyphonic synth. First experiment with a piano interface. Great product. He had his team at this point.
2016: Last Volca. (Volca Kick) – the most abstract one.
2017: Arp Odyssey FS + Korg Monologue

After the Korg Monologue project, he moved from Tokyo to Cologne, Germany in 2018. He got a job at YADASTAR gmbH, which spawned 2 important career-changing projects related to Red Bull Music Academy.

The first project was a collaboration with Ryoji Ikeda called A (For 100 Cars). In this audiovisual composition, was made 100 sine waves generators, each with a different frequency, and played them back through 100 cars with extensive sound systems, which turned into a big drone piece.

The second one was developing a new synthesizer concept called Granular Convolver, built alongside Christoph Hohnerlein and Maximilian Rest on the 20th anniversary of the event (Berlin), given to every contestant. This device juxtaposes two concepts on electronic synthesis: granular synthesis, the manipulation of tiny signals, and convolution synthesis, the conjoining of two movements.

Talking to Tatsuya was very inspiring. I never expected to dialogue with someone who made the synths I usually work with or dream of having. In my opinion, the Volcas changed the way I used to look at synthesizers – they always seemed unreachable, expensive, and uncompressible pieces of technology. My first synthesizer was the Korg Monologue, his last achievement with Korg Japan, and it allowed me to develop my first drone experimental tracks. His legacy might be one the most generation-defining ones. I think the availability of music for people characterizes the ’10s. Many considered non-musicians were allowed to make their first steps into music using ready-to-use and straightforward software, such as Ableton, FL Studio, or Logic Pro. The digital era provides music to people and even to kids who can now play these analogue-digital instruments. “Music Has The Right To Children,” said Boards of Canada. Still, music also has the right to be part of our lives, without exclusively listening to it, but also making it, without being pressured by this huge codified background language called music theory. Music has the right to the people because it is there where it all started and where it should all end.

#6 Creative Projects – A small reflection

https://soundcloud.com/louistabu/sound-piece-v6/s-58Zs0XhcpBz

This is the final product. I spent a week working on this 5-minute long piece and from a certain point, I knew I couldn’t go back on what I did. I might have overthought this project too much, due to the fact of my persistent perfectionist work philosophy that doesn’t allow any incoherent feature to step in. This could be either the rise or the dawn of my piece. I recognize that the final piece is not as bad as I expected, although I confess that I shoot in the wrong direction. I may have focused too much on the musical aspect of the piece instead of the sound part. This makes me ask where does this problem could be centered: is it my incapability of not being sufficiently prepared to work with sound only? is it sound that isn’t as versatile and easy to understand as music is? or are these the wrong questions that should be asked after the culmination of a project? I believe all these questions are correct, but I’m not yet prepared to answer them.

#5 Creative Projects – Sampling

This post is dedicated to showcasing all the references my sound piece has in terms of references and samples used.

(1) Steve Reich – Triple Quartet: Second Movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyu0xsoGnQ

I previously used this sample on the intro track of an album that I had planned to release this year. Unfortunately, I lost everything to an encrypted virus. I decided to reuse the sample in a different way, thinking this time on the sound piece I had to deliver to this signature. I came up with the idea of giving the sound a specific element of one of my favorite films Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by the thailandese director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The film talks about the feeling of finitude and preparation for death. Boonmee, who suffers from terminal kidney disease, is visited by its past lives and family who are represented through demon-like creatures with a monkey appearance. The following scene is the introductory sequence of the film and was the scene I focused on to address my sound piece.

This spectacular scene gave life to my initial piece that I later called The First Time I Saw Frozen Red Eyes Starring At Me.

https://soundcloud.com/louistabu/the-first-time-i-saw-frozen-red-eyes-starring-at-me

It tracked didn’t work out as I wanted to, because it became at some point a little bit dull. Nevertheless, I used it as the main structure of my final piece

(2) John Lurie – Improv rehearsel in Stuggart with a Soprano Saxophone

This rehearsal turned out to be one of his most famous performances that took place in a soundcheck Stuggart (East Germany, 1989). The video belongs to a documentary about his tour. I used this sample for its unique way of playing the Saxo and to follow along with the whole aesthetic of my piece. At the same time, I wanted a sample of Saxo that sounded like Angelo Badalamenti’s song Dance of the Dream Man – full of reverb, provocative, erotic, dirty.

John Lurie is also something that I often like to connect with, especially if it directs to Jim Jarmusch’s dirty decadent reality films like Stranger than Paradise (one of my personal favorites).

(3) João Villaret – recital of the poem “Cântico Negro” written by José Régio.

Born in the same period as José Régio, João Villaret was a portuguese actor from the ’50s. During this decade, every Sunday at 8pm, João Villaret would open the people’s ears with his really emotional recitals of infamous Portuguese poets. One of them was “Cântico Negro”, which was seen as a rebel act against Salazar. I sampled the whole audio and separated it into two parts inside my piece. You can find a translated version of the poem in one of my previous posts related to this project.

(4) Camaron de la Isla – Quiero Quitarme Esta Pena

I have two obsessions. One of them is Flamenco Nostalgia and the other is Flamenco Nostalgia. Recently Spanish pop artists have been using flamenco and Spanish traditions to be their leitmotifs on their music. The most evident musicians are Rosalia, who in the last 4 years released 2 flamenco-based albums Los Ángeles (2017) and El Mar Querer (2018), and C. Tangana, who released this year an album that reached instant national popularity and world recognition with El Madrileño (2021). I must confess that in 2020 I was infected by this Spanish nostalgia bug, and ever since I couldn’t stop listen to flamenco and read more about Spanish culture (my culture). Camaron de la Isla became my new favorite pop star and Paco de Lucia became my new religion. My head bangs with flamenco the same way it bangs with Techno Music. However, in this project, the sample served as a chiaroscuro for the piece, to contrast with the more devilish sounds. I used flamenco the resemble something god-like and sublime.

(5) Scene and Song of the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) directed by David Lynch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsttKnIFrR8&t=26s

This is scene is one of my all-time favorites, not in terms of cinematography, but rather in terms of symbolism and visual art. The bar scene from the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” represents Laura Palmer’s darkest side. A version of herself that no other character knew of – only deviants and Bob would know this side of her, without knowing her other fragile persona. This scene served as an inspiration to compose the music representing the grotesque face of the piece, because of this dream-like dirty slow blues that throws the listener to dance in the most unconventional way possible. The song was inserted in Angelo Badalamenti’s OST album, but it was originally composed by David Lynch himself.

(6) David Lynch Sound Experimentalism

Extract from an interview with Jay Leno in 2000:

Jay Leno: I didn't know you were a musician.
David Lynch: I'm not a musician.
(...)
D: I play (the guitar) upside down and backwards. I'm working the wang bar with my left hand. Guitar players might laugh at me but I'm still still getting the thing to do what I want it to do
J: And what is that?
D: To talk to me.

David Lynch’s way to fulfill his goals in these matters doesn’t always cross the line of knowledge. He created his own ways to treat the instrument and successfully found a way to make the guitar do its job. By exploring his techniques, I decided to play the electric guitar the same way he explained in that conversation and, like him, I succeeded in making the guitar talk to me.

#4 Creative Projects – Sexto Sentido

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.

#3 Creative Projects – Falso Recuerdo

Falso Recuerdo, Falsa Memoria, False Memory. This is a short film that I’ve done that talks about the psychological phenomenon of a false memory, usually known as FMS (false memory syndrome). In this short film, I discuss one false memory I have of something that happened supposedly last year. In it, I try to use sound as the main character and guidance for the story, Memory is the recollection of something that occurred in the past, but it is an FMS, that occurrence never took place, but the subject would have a strong belief and desire on that memory. Sometimes those memories are connected to something very traumatic, but in other cases are just regular happenings. This piece was meant to be my sound piece for the album.

Sometimes, this false memory makes me feel that it was a way to describe something I want in the future.

#2 Creative Projects – José Régio as my guideline

I wrote down the words past, present, and future, making me remember one of my favorite poems – Cântico Negro (Black Chant) written by the Portuguese poet José Régio, compiled in the book (Poems of the Devil and God), published in 1926 – who talks about one’s choosing its fate without caring about other’s wills.

"come this way" — some say with sweet eyes 
opening their arms, and certain 
that it would be good if I would listen 
when they say: "come this way"! 
I look at them with languidly, 
(my eyes filled with irony and tiredness) 
and I cross my arms, 
and I never go that way... 
this is my glory: 
to create inhumanity! 
to accompany no one. 
— for I live with the same unwillingness
with which i tore my mother's womb
no, I won't go that way! 
I only go where my own steps take me... 
if to what I seek to know no one can answer 
why do you repeat: "come this way"?
 
I rather crawl thru muddy alleys, 
to whirl in the wind, 
like rags, to drag my bleeding feet, 
than to go that way... 
if I came to this world, it was
only to deflower virgin forests, 
and to draw my own footsteps in the unexplored sand! 
all else I do is worth nothing.

how can you be the ones 
that give me impulses, tools and courage 
to overcome my own obstacles? 
the blood of our ancestors runs thru your veins, 
And you love what is easy! 
I love the Far and the Mirage, 
I loves the abysses, the torrents, the deserts... 

go! you have roads, 
you have gardens, you have flower-beds, 
you have a nation, you have roofs, 
and you have rules, and treaties, and philosophers, and wise men. 
I have my Madness! 
I hold it high like a torch burning in the dark night, 
and I feel foam, and blood, and chants on my lips... 
God and the Devil guide me, no one else! 
everyone's had a father, everyone's had a mother;  
but I, who never begin or end, 
was born of the love between God and the Devil.

ah! don't give me sympathetic intentions! 
don't asks me for definitions! 
don't tells me: "come this way"! 
my life is a whirlwind that broke loose, 
it's a wave that rose. 
it's one more atom that ignited...  
I don’t know which way I’ll go, 
I don't know where I'm going to, 
- I know I'm not going that way!

Régio was born at the beginning of the XX century in the northern village of Vila do Conde, a time where Portugal was living its last blows of the monarchy. Portugal was in constant metamorphosis, being death and poverty the price of these consecutive changes. In less than 30 years, Portugal killed 2 kings, implemented a Republic, had 45 governments from 1910 to 1926, killed a dictator, killed thousands of unprepared soldiers in WWI, and started one of the worst European fascist dictatorships in 1930, which only ended in 1974 with another war. José Régio lived all this, being defiant of everything that occurred throughout this period of time.

The poem works a manifest with modernists premisses that dictated his poetic work and the presentist generation – presentism is the philosophical belief of the inexistence of past nor future. It only exists an (eternal) present. Nevertheless, it is important to clarify the difference between presentism and eternalism – this last one doesn’t deny the existence of the past, although eternalists argue that figures from the past have nothing to with the present nor future.

If we analyze the poem, we can notify a constant interaction between the Devil and God, which represent the grotesque and the sublime. Their movement is the reason why the poetic subject is shouting because his attitudes are a reflection of their relation. Therefore his acts are stranger. His individuality resides in his choices and not in the paths everyone seeks. For him, it is imperative to always opt for a different way, even if it is obscure or difficult to cross – the necessity of being unique and being against destiny. He must avoid the future at all costs, and for him, it is not a problem to be placed in the same place as the crazy and the deviants, because he knows his psychological nature.

#1 Creative Projects – The Concept and Artwork

Creative Projects is a signature conducted by Gareth Mitchell and José Macabra. The following posts would be related to the thinking process for the album “I’ve been away but now I’m back” made by Group C.

Future can be very defiant to describe. As a part of group C, this thinking process was our first shot for a concept, being Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) the first recommendation to take place in our first meetings. Other films were presented concerning this matter, such as the 1982 film directed by Riddley Scott Blade Runner or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. By looking at all these films we concluded that the subject wasn’t describing the future, rather describing the present by using the future as a reference. Therefore we decided to challenge ourselves to do the opposite – to depict the future by using the past.

We managed to find a few ideas that connected to this theme such as the north-American record producer Daedelus, who does electronic music (mostly IDM and Hip Hop) fused with samples taken from pieces of music of the ’20s. A great example would be his 2002 album “Invention”, where can be found his most knowledgeable work, with tracks such as Pursued Lips Reply, Astroboy, Adventress, Muggle Born, and Experience (song sampled by MF DOOM on the track Accordion – Madvillainy).

The artist Nmesh, who is a prominent musician related to the vaporwave movement, a genre of electronic music acknowledge by sampling 80’s songs and slowing them down, giving it a very futuristic look. Cocktails in Space is a great example of his work: a track where can be heard a space symphony with a considerable amount of reverb, vinyl crackle, and some small voice samples that work as garnish. The result is a beautiful feeling of “missing” and a never-lived nostalgia. Last but not least, it was suggested a Frank Bretschneider’s album supper.trigger and label Raster-Noton, which belongs to the same artist, Carsten Nicolai, as known as Alva Noto, and Olaf Bender, in 1996.

In a book called Retromania, by Simon Reynolds, it is explained this thinking as something that humanity does for centuries by doing questions like: is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward? or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? He also refers to every avant-garde movement as arrière-garde, because for him almost nothing is new. The most evident example would be the renaissance movement, in which Greco-roman art was taken as a major inspiration.

As for the artwork and title for our album, we as a group liked the idea of “dancing with the past in the future”, not only because we looked at our project as something “danceable”, but at the same time, aesthetically, we liked the idea of fusing both realities. At first, we were considering taking a photo of Joanna Besarab, our colleague, dancing, as she is a really good dancer. Unfortunately, this idea didn’t enough resources to be executed. Instead, we decided to look after photographs of Dance Hall’s from the ’50s – they’re mostly long shots of hundreds of people dancing. This feature would represent the past, as for the future, we decided to collage the previous photo in a space scenario, but with a ’60s aesthetic. This would be a final result, well done by Rocco Wallis:

Lastly, the thinking process for the title was quite interesting, whereby we decided to select a line from the bar scene of Kubrick’s The Shinning. In that scene occurs an interesting phenomenon – the director induces the spectator to believe that Jack is hallucinating and that he can see and dialogue with people that lived in the Hotel he is in. Nevertheless, Jack uses the past to describe his current situation, while the imaginative characters describe him with occurrences that will happen in the future. In some way, this scene matches themes with our project, so we decided to take on the lines of that scene as the title for our album. I’ve been away but now I’m back.

“I’ve been away but now I’m back” appears as soon as Jack reaches Lloyd, the bartender

#⁵ ⁻ ᴺᵒᵗᵉˢ ᵒⁿ ᴰⁱʳᵉᶜᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᴬᶜᵗᵒʳˢ ᵃⁿᵈ ˢᶜʳⁱᵖᵗ ᵂʳⁱᵗⁱⁿᵍ

Me and Jack Centro investigated various Instagram personalities, and from there, build a character that would help us write a script for our interview. Jack was in charge of this bit, while I dedicated my time writing the script and organizing the structure of the story. For me, it wasn’t difficult, because I have a going-on relation with Cinema and I enjoy writing scripts for my short-films. Once, my colleague had his job done, Just_Cindy was created – the pinnacle of an influencer’s stereotype. I decided that Just_Cindy would be a character that would expose her self in the same terms as Guy Debord exposed society. Collaterally, we used Debord’s death as an interlude for our story, with the leitmotif of pointing out society’s fate. In one week, we had our job complete and we were proud and confident to present it to the rest. Working with Jack was engaging because it took me back to the days where I was immersed in pre-production meetings with the film crew, developing the script and other technical aspects. Jack gave me the same spirit and we worked greedily towards our objectives.

After the script reading meeting, I suggested that my sister, Ângela Ramos (Gigi), could play CINDY, as she is a professional actress. Daniel Pakdel would play DANIEL and finally, I would act as GUY. This was the most difficult part for me and probably for anyone because I had to direct my Ângela (a professional actress) and Daniel (a non-actor). I spent the whole week rehearsing with both, adding new annotations and changes to the script to make it look more solid and plausible. I tried my best to don’t annoy them and be very demanding, as this task has to be very precise and well done. I also had to manage the meetings to the rehearsals and the studio sessions in Barcelona so Ângela could record her voice. For this, I’ve to thank my friend Lola J. Espejo for being the recordist behind my sister’s sessions. On other hand, Daniel was a bit more complicated as being a non-actor and having zero experience in this area. I’ve gone through with him with various references of real-life podcast interviews, and finally, we managed to get his part perfectly. Gigi managed to complete her part in three takes and Daniel in two.