Waking up and finding the floor all white was splendid! Man, it really does feel like rolling on it all day! Everyone who shows up at our door, if not with words, says it with their eyes that they really are boldly struck by such dramatic impact. Now, we record everything down here in the basement because we want to avoid dirtying the floor upstairs, which, later on, will be marked by Sara as she advances through the construction process of her piece. We had good lighting conditions for most of the day: warm enough, intense, but quite filtered by two entrances on the west, diffusing the source and making up for a cosy environment but, at the same time, of moving serenity and force. In order to test the new spatial disposition, here we had Roberto Moniz to record after lunch-time. He told us about his first musical learning experiences, at home, amidst chordophones, singing and lots of playing around. Zé Camacho followed next, energetically telling us about memories, very close to those of Rui Camacho (his brother). These included Praia do Toco as well as the Fish Square and the General Market. A bit further into the middle of the afternoon, we achieved to record the places suggested by Roberto Moniz, which agglomerated the frantic sounds of cars and ships at the docks. By the description, if undenoted, Funchal could very well be New York in the 70s. Now, with the decision of prolonging the period for which 'Taxonomy' is open to the public, Rodrigo has been serving as a receptionist to audiences who flow through our doors like rivers of so many sources. We are having it so much confirmed that there are clear benefits in keeping such a strange immaculately white floor… Already by the end of the day, there came still, almost not to stop, this old man who had been the proprietor of barely the whole estate down the road! Reacting to some incredulity on our part, he said: 'come one, alright, not of all of it, only the ones on the left I owned them!'. He then narrated to us the brief story of number 17 [PIPINOIR's door number] and went away, happy for having spoken to someone during his walk, confirming, upon saying goodbye, the benefits of talking to strangers. 'Everyone needs it in the end!'. Photographs by Sara Rodrigues
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As agreed, we went down to Xarabanda by the morning to sit for a rehearsal of Carmina Belli, a project instigated by Tozé Cardoso, in which Alexandra Barbosa sings and Miguel Rosado plays the drums. They are about to launch the project, so stay alert! As the rehearsal ended, we took Alexandra to PIPINOIR, since it was her time to be interviewed by Sara. In the middle of questions, she rescued from an endless list of songs, just two, one in English and another one in Brazilian, by Fáfá de Belém, which she used to listen to when she was very little. As promised, there was a family lunch. We went up to Santo Antínio for an authentic Barbosa-Jardim symposium at Tia Anita's house. As it had been already pointed at as one of the prominent sounds in Mariana B Camacho's memory, the already traditional environment of such encounters was captured by Sara, with Filipe's mobile phone. There was much noise, crossed conversations, hysterical laughter attacks, good mood, dirty jokes (some just nonsensical), sleepy snores, good food and so on… Back to PIPINOIR, there came this young man who had lived many years in Paris. Now he is back and, having enjoyed being presented the insides of the project, he said 'Madeira surely needs more things like this'. We asked him if he was somehow related to music, to which he responded saying 'no', but he then told us, with vibrant certainty, that he thought it was important to always keep oneself updated about which things are cultural agents doing. Another surprising visit was from Vitor Hugo's, another young man (with the strongest handshake), who drives touristic cabbies around in Funchal. He found us during his unplanned walk during his lunch break and loved the space. He also liked the project very much and said to us that he would sincerely try to bring more tourists here, for they have been wanting to get to now a more cultural kind of Madeira. In the end, we talked about everyone doing his or her (p)art, him his and us ours, in this thing we call life. Today was also the day we so much have waited to PAINT ALL FLOOR WHITE! Just one paint bucket did not suffice, so we had to buy another one. We found the same guy who had recommended opting for high-quality paint and as he was so cordial and nice, the affability granted him a personal invitation to the next opening, that of 'The state of things' by Sara. Having finished painting the floor bright white, we noticed that now, people could not avoid staring at POPINOIR and asking us what is going on in here whenever they are just passing by through Rua dos Aranhas. The thing is that it became a kind of a strikingly luminous supernova in the middle of a road that is somewhat dark and strong on orangey tones. Photograph by Rui A. Camacho Photograph by Sara Rodrigues
Today we had our last workshop, on Sonic Art, Phonography and Acoustic Ecology. We started a discussion about sound; about what it is, about what it is not and about the differences that exist between everything we can think of as sound and other more traditional concepts from the western art music world. We talked about philosophical positions and drew a mind map together. We thought about the physical, emotional, anthropological, social and artistic dimensions (from the perspective of myriad practices, from music to soundscape composition) etc. We noticed that, in truth, there are no words enough to discuss the sonic world with sufficient specificity… The metaphors are so many, so little the certainties. We recorded the participants' voices and made some experiments with each one's spectral images. In doing so, one can uncover the harmonic world that exists inside each sound we produce, no matter how simple they are. We ultimately tried to recognise the origin of each of the recorded voices, only by referring to their timbres, preventing ourselves from looking at the screen, which was showing all tracks adequately tagged with our names. The challenge was to gradually shorten the voice little by little, up to the point at which only a little bit of the first phoneme could be herd. After so much informational density, we went outside, on a sonic walk, which involved everyone walking around like a floc through Funchal, with special concentration paid to the sonic world surrounding us. The interest resided on the search for the sources, qualities, behaviours, forms and tropes. We went down to the ocean and came back on a straight line, for the time was short, but the discussion generated at the end of the workshop was so exciting! Each one felt and listened to very different things. In general, everyone had agreed on the importance of the aesthetic sensibility on a daily basis, that is: how much attention we deposit on the details of the everyday. Print screen from the voice recording session Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
We woke up early to go record the fish market, guided through Rui's memory, who told us about being taken there by his father a lot when he was little. Coming back to PIPINOIR, we readily received Carlos Jorge who, with his radiophonic voice, interpreted and described what one could hear from the market recording. He then pointed us towards a bunch of sounds, but before that, he still recalled some songs, although at the end he had sung not very much. In the meanwhile, we discovered that, indeed, Carlos Jorge does actually know how to play chordophones! At least, the bits enough to demonstrate his skills at the Bailinho [Madeiran traditional improvisatory music style]! In the end, he indicated us a conveniently neighbouring sound, right on Rua dos Aranhas, from the time when the stonework from streets used to still be hammered down on the sand, and not on cement as it now is done. He described sounds so percussively district, that he concluded that someday someone should do a piece dedicated to those sounds only! Then there came Roberto Moritz, who until now was the most concise. He even played his famous 'Dança da toutinegra' and a groove from Pink Floyd, which he adapted right there for his little machete (made by Carlos Jorge). After we said goodbye, we crossed Rua das Mercês, for it was there, nearby his father's house, that he remembers hearing the scissors sharpeners, with these characteristic cane flutes, which they used in their callings. We recorded, obviously, the absence of such a sound. Then we came back to PIPINOIR so that Sara could continue the interviews. On our way back, for the second time already, we found people sitting on the entrance's steps. What an inviting door! This time it was Hugo and his son Adei from the Basque Country. We invited them in for a kind of a "pre-inauguration", which Adei produced an experimental recording of. He truly loved handling our wide-angle Sony camera for some minutes. In the end, he said it looked like just on TV. We recorded Fernanda, who made herself well heard, garnished with some really nice references from the 80's experimental vocal music. She told us it was very nice to have been able to recall all these songs and singing them, which made us so happy. We then booked a visit to her office on another day, to record this little brook, which one can only hear if access is granted to the inside of this housing complex where she works. Close to 7 pm, everything got prepared for the official opening, to which around fifty people came, which we thought was quite good, given that the house was literally filled up completely with such a special group of people. There was family, friends, tourists and lots of curiosity. The representatives of the main cultural institutions were also present, Natércia Xavier from the Regional Cultural Bureau and Sandra Nóbrega from the City Hall, who were key actors in financing this project. It was truly a varied house, full of so interesting and enriching moments and opinions. Photograph by Rui A. Camacho Photographs by Sara Rodrigues
Sleeping happened but not in great amounts. We woke up early for we had to go and record the ocean at Praia do Toco, just beside Lazareto. Breakfast was covered with yawning and a somewhat morning-tide apathy, counterposed with a suspicious energy Rodrigo had. Every time he sleeps close to five hours alone, he gets very jumpy the following day but from the evening onwards he threats to just wither down without a warning. Clenched on a rock at the edge of this cliff, it felt utterly scientific to throw two wires into the ocean in order to record it, but those were simply two contact mics connected to a Zoom H5. It was Helena who drove us to the beach, who, in truth, had never actually been there! We were very happy with our introduction to the place and for having understood that this beach was one of the most incredibly curious things in the whole of Funchal; with some zinc shacks, and the oddest nicknacks hanging around everywhere, including some strange cane-sticks, one of them lynching a plastic doll's head, and even some rabbits and chickens (sadly all inside this one jail) and a freely roaming turkey, very defensive of his own territory. Thanks Daniel! Having come back to PIPINOIR, still salty, we have met Paula Henriques [one of Funchal's main cultural reporters] for an interview before lunchtime. We can say she was entitled to a true 'private view'. In the afternoon, we recorded Rui Camacho. Between Xarabanda, Vértice, Algozes and various memories from his childhood, Rui was as expansive as we feared he would have been. It looks like our 'blacklist' can very well become true. Sara, upon listening back to the recordings, searching for new suggestions of places to record in Funchal, understood that interviewing people is an optimal way of deeply learning the things that run just too quickly in every conversation about culture. At night, the last fine-tuning was done to 'Taxonomy' so that no one's voice would become subsumed under general noise too much. Photograph by Mariana B. Camacho Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
The day started with Rodrigo's piece still installed. With the recent change in plans, we sill don't have the floor painted white but Sara has already gone to buy a map of Funchal, in order to guide herself through the sites that will be referred to by each participant in her piece. She also bought plenty batteries for the sound recorder. We had our first interviewee, who came in antecedence, and even without any booking, during what was technically an installation day. It was Daniel Melim again, who is going to have to return to Lisbon tomorrow! Although music is not his main artistic focus - as painting and drawing are - he is however interested in different areas of art because of their therapeutic power. We learned that he had participated in shamanic rituals with chants carrying in them the spirits of certain sacred plants! Afterwards, without even having planed it, we all went together to Estalagem da Ponta do Sol, to listen to Sérgio Godinho. We also got some homework from Melim for tomorrow, who referred Praia do Toco as the place in Funchal whose sound he finds unavoidably inscribed in his memory. Now there we go with contact mics in order to record underwater environments with our very characteristic rolling stones! Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
During lunchtime, Manuel called us to tell us about this disastrous accident that had just happened in the morning during Festa do Monte [one of the most mattering religious festivities of Madeira]. Some people died, so he advised us to ponder about postponing the inauguration onto another day. With the accelerated and full-directed preparation processes going on, and not quite knowing how to react to this, we headed down to PIPINOIR nonetheless. With the sound installation all sorted and tuned, and with food and drinks ready downstairs, at 5 pm we received this phone call informing us that a regional mourning had been declared for the following three days. As soon as we further learned about the event that had happened, and in agreement with the institutional mourning, we thence changed Taxonomy's opening to Friday at the same time. We sent a message to everyone and remained there, solely with this strange weighty air. Even so, we decided to stay in the space and still warmly receive those who, not knowing about the sociopolitical context, could nonetheless come by our door. Two of them were Mark, a musical software programmer who teaches at the Royal College of Arts at the Hague in Holland, and Pau, a visual artist who taught at the University of Madeira. We talked a lot and, surprisingly, in Portuguese with both… Photograph by Mariana B. Camacho
We are well used to days that seem like a pack of two, but this one was surely the project's most crowded day! It seems as though everyone waited until the last minute to participate, and as soon as they realised the opening would be in the next day, here they came join the party. We started with João Caldeira and with (João) Diogo Castro, who both appeared dressed in blue, in shorts, with a melodica on their right hand. In the end, both chose different sketches, but which had been used in the same piece; 'THE WOLF GAME - DEATH BY HYPERSTRESS'! João reconstructed a music piece he likes, whilst heeding a scheme for the dramaturgical preparation of material. On the other side, Diogo interpreted various harmonic fields related to the game's moments, including situations like love potions being thrown around by witches and attending voting polls in a direct democracy style to see who should get lynched. Following, arrived Diogo (Andrade), hilariously also with another melodica, given we hadn't had any by that time… He stayed with us for a long while, assessing what he would do with so many drawings, between advancing with his own structures and deeply understanding Rodrigo's. We tried to frame some of the things he came up with within some parts of what the screen's contents were suggesting, but in the end, we noticed a tiny (but powerful) fragment referring to pressure modulations in vocal production. Since a melodica is more or less like a voice instrument, the indications seamlessly fitted our purpose and everyone turned happy! Joana Bolito, who came with Diogo Andrade, had plenty of time to consider the terms of her participation and, as it was her time to record, she promptly chose a text; again about that same Iranian-Iraqi girl called Roxanna. In a fado-like style, she sang a beautiful melody about having been born in Kingston; the one in London, not the one in Jamaica. Daniel Melim brought us in his voice some more primal sounds, with some elements that reminded us of a didjeridu. The graph he chose was a fluid yet rhythmically driven wave, and so was his participation. Roberto Moniz came to PIPINOIR again, for his recording had become mysteriously corrupted some days earlier. This time, he got even looser on his fervent spoken word improv and started even speaking of his grandmother and offered us a song the borracheiros [professional wine carriers] used to sing. At the point when we thought we had listened to things enough, there came Zé Camacho armed with his box of surprises. After some singing on the Rajão, he fetched this graph displaying various textures, where he introduced the sounds we indeed had not heard in 'Taxonomy' before. With ducks, cows, chickens and much more, enjoyment and energy were plenty, as were the occasional amazing stories. We did not mention though that Zé had brought with him an even more wondrous company, Mário André! He arrived and said he was there just to quietly support everyone and just attend without participating but of course, the story became another one thereafter… In the meanwhile, Manuel Rodriguez, who since the beginning had promised us a participation, wasting no time at all, climbed on top of a ladder with his modified viola de arame around his waist. He glanced at several drawings and jumped towards some lines, sonifying them with interjections and sounds of pondering like "hum…" and "ahhh…". With this, a great debate starts on themes as varied as the project's participants within the fields of music and art. At some point, Manuel had girded his viola and started firing us with his exceptional improvisations with Mario André and Rui Camacho drumming along. This, of course, attracted other roaming characters: a little eight-year-old boy who played Brasilian tambourine, Mariana B. Camacho, who joined us singing and this Russian international affairs lawyer who decided to just linger around and listen. We, very entertained with the whole situation, eventually had to withdraw ourselves from the party in order to start implanting the rest of the hooks, an act which we performatively introduced with 'a noise-drill solo'. With this, there we were, again, until the earliest hours in the morning, alone, at last, checking where each participant's sound, as every loudspeaker, would ultimately be placed! Photographs by Sara Rodrigues Photographs by Rui A. Camacho
Today was a straight and direct day in which Rodrigo dedicated himself to complete the sailcloth screen with the last column of fragments to the right. Two hours before the whole thing got completed, Sara went for an ice cream, considering it was really hot. In truth, there was nothing more one could do at PIPINOIR but to finish the fucking screen. The 'service' was finished - to everyone's decompression - but the loudspeakers are still to be installed… tomorrow will be the day for this. Photograph by Rui A. Camacho
Saturday was a super long day. We started early with the second workshop, on notation and interpretation. As soon as we started it, we straight away went outside again, with an increased attention after the sounds of Rua dos Aranhas, which we had to take notes of. First, we did it freely, but in the meanwhile, we started incorporating the notation systems which kept emerging from the group's discussions into our sketchbooks. The conversation was remarkably fruitful and also counted with the participation of this Spanish tourist, Roberto, who loves contemporary music. It was yesterday that we were introduced to each other, when he told us he would come to the workshop, even though he had to go back to Spain tonight! In the afternoon we wandered through squares, triangles and circles so to sharpen our compositional capacities and, to finish things off, we conjointly made a group piece. In the course of several phases, each of us kept generating granular material, which, step by step, became processed and crystallised on a A2 sized grid. The result was a composition, which we interpreted three times. Given the complexity we generated in harmonic, rhythmic and textural levels, we actually got a headache from doing it. At the end of the workshop, we still managed to record both Marianas. Mariana Andrade brought us little percussion instruments, all of which could fit on one's hand. She interpreted (with some voice effects) a drawing, with the title 'Percussion?', whose size on the screen gradually diminished and so did her performance. Mariana B. Camacho decided not to use her melodic voice; to her mother's misfortune. Using with Portuguese phonetics, she read the transcription (in English) of an interview featuring a girl who was half Iranian half Iraqi, despite having been born in England and not knowing any of her origin's languages. After PIPINOIR, we made it through to Daniel Melim's exhibition at Porta 33 [contemporary art non-commercial gallery in Funchal], who is showing his evocative sunny drawings, which we enjoyed very much. Yet, the day was not finished here. We still went to Ponta do Sol in order to listen to Anna Meredith and her band at the Estalagem [bespoke alternative music venue in west Madeira], whose concert we watched well excited on top of a dragon-tree. Returning to Funchal, our trip was not the most direct one. Our friends convinced us to go for some stargazing at Paúl da Serra [Madeira's largest geological plateau], but the waning moon was still strong enough to keep us from seeing constellations. The gasoline pointer, hitting the reserves, was accompanied with a bit of fear and some ecstasy; up and down, along our three-people electro-improv. Melim quite proudly called it 'Mixordia' [hodge-podge]. Photographs by Rui A. Camacho
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