Karlheinz Stockhausen - Oktophonie - 1990-91

E no mundo cromático, e no mundo como vontade e representação, quem tiver de sapato não sobra, não sobrará.

Verité

At the beginning of 2000 during a 9 month residency as visiting artists at the Department of Performance of the Queen Mary University in London we wrote a 50 minute mini fake-opera/novela for 1 voice, electronics and piano called Verité. Here is some of rare footage the piece which tells the story of 2 Brazilian passport forgers & a French privileged student who crossed paths in Paris in 1968. 

File under white bureaucracy, multi-nationalities, sex maniacs, l'écriture et la différence, visas, cultural grants and bursaries, socialism, sublimations, de-sublimations,1968.

Performed at the Harold Painter studio at Queen Mary University, London, Feb 2000.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2_5G3rTF4c

BLACK SEMIOTICS - Manual Operator (volume 3)

I use the term “black semiotics” as an unofficial DIY poetic and political speculative diagram in the form of an affective cartography (or a spaced out grammar) of musical signs, sounds, indices, affects and feelings which can be located and/or perceived spatially and temporally, simultaneously, in the inner spaces of songs (or sounds) and on the outside in the air. This gesture shall be understood as a possibility to engage with distinct modes of subjectivation and processes of sublimation - as a sonic metaphor for talking about forms of musicality, improvisation and sensibility (or for speculating upon physical, ethereal and sensorial qualities encountered in the act of ‘composing’  – including an exploration of social and psycho conditions for creation and an examination of forms of pre-industrialized, serialized or capitalized processes) of any musical material;  obscure, overlooked or popular - and also as a political-aesthetic expression of resistance in relation to distinct hegemonic musical scenes or sonic contexts both internally and externally in the ‘world territory’ to use a jargon present in standardized music industry contracts. 

In this regard, an electronic clap in the syntax of a programmed rhythm pattern in a song; a small sound fragment of a sampled syllable such as “ai”  taken from the  phrase “ai amor” for example - doubled or duplicated as a an unstable sonic interval produced by hitting two different notes on a cheap sampling keyboard - or an entire song as a wave form in a computer screen or an ‘artist’ in flesh or virtually (well-placed or displaced in any territory) or in name (a group, a collective or an entity or intensities in the plane of consistency) in relation of reciprocity or not with other artists, groups, collectives or sonic expressions and experiences - may be felt, lived, read, translated and transformed inter-semiotically (as) and (into) new components of a sexually-charged reflexive automatic musico-writing improvisation to invent and/or generate new unfixed ramifications, associations, and other singular relations between forms, substances, expressions and contents. The concept of black semiotics, thus, is thought in the context of this manifesto in terms of sonic, psycho-social, spatial and temporal relations which are not fixed or unified as discourse. These ‘signs’ may act randomly and inappropriately in the articulation of a displaced black-latino-brown-caboclo-mestizo poetic event for reading other semiotic processes and encounters in the ‘world territory’. These relations of movement can be thought in terms of active foreign voices against dominant narratives and are able to provide other contexts for the production, reception and appreciation of a multiplicity of intensities, presences and sonic landscapes. In this sense, Brazilian post punk, funk carioca and other tropicalized moments – be they visible musical genres or intrinsic forms of musicality (you might think of numerous examples such as samba canção, bossa nova, pagode, samba de breque, partido alto, or Tropicalismo, Vanguarda Paulista, electropop, synth pop, punk, pop Rock or even Afro-Brazilian religious such as Camdomble, Macumba or any other syncretic ritual both in terms of musicality or specific genre categories if you like) - can be read both as separated and relational components, assemblages, processes and ideological  ‘signs’ of what we call Black Semiotics. In practice, these relations of production of materiality, semiotic immateriality, incorporeality, historicity and subjectivity have been serving an equally active, resistant and foreign ‘deterritorialized’ black market for a number of years.