On my Spring tour to Portugal I played at Cossoul in Lisboa, traveled to Porto for the party at Sonoscopia and returned for the first gig at Sistema SMOP. By that time I was longing for a group session 😉
Come May 1st I met up with Ernesto Rodrigues and José Bruno Parrinha, or rather tried as (surprise, surprise 😉 there was a manifestação blocking the Praça Martim Moniz. Cars were blocked but I managed to cross and we drove over the Ponte 25 de Abril and onward to Flak‘s home and studio in the countryside.
I patched my modular, enjoying the sunshine and a drink on the terrace…
…and then it was time to set up in the cozy studio space.
Flak was at the recording station, playing lap guitar with FX and engineering the multitrack, Bruno was playing the bass clarinet on the opposite end, and me and Ernesto with his viola were snuggled up on between. I don’t remember kneeling, but the pillow is proof that I must have spent the entire session in this position.
Here is my setup of modular, STEIM Crackle Box and Stereo Field next to the OpenTheremin v4 I brought along.
We began tracking with a 20-30 minute long, continuous, freely improvised deep dive. After that I suggested we record a sequence of miniatures between three and five minutes of length to explore different sonic characters and colours, with more focus on developing each one–rather than trying to cover all possible ground. I picked that up from Thomas Reuter when recording the al’kar(r)at SUITE. And on and on we recorded, until the evening culminated in a delicious affair involving black linguine, fried shrimp in a delicious sauce and me and Ernesto singing our favourite opera arias.
The result of (the recorded part of) our session is available now on all major music downloading and streaming platforms as “Quadruple Quadrature Questions“.
