Category Archives: João P. Feliciano

Excellent compilation album of experimental and improvised music from Portugal. No Noise Reduction are João Paulo Feliciano (born in 1963 in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal) is a designer and also a sound and visual artist, and Rafael Toral who is a musician and sound engineer also active in visual arts. Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1967, he has been performing live since 1984. Having attempted to study music, he realized his path was one of exploration and discovery, to which conventional music teaching was irrelevant. Considered by the Chicago Reader to be “one of the most gifted and innovative guitarists of the decade”, his work focuses mainly on the possibilities of ambient music (variable attention listening process), the electric guitar as a sound generator and improvisation with higher levels of risk (using instruments or systems that behave in unpredictable ways). Exploring relations between sound phenomena such as resonance or difference tones and the human capacity for creative listening, Toral has developed a sound world weaving a unique blend of references such as ambient, rock, chance and improvisation. He recorded several solo Cd’s, two with the MIMEO electronic orchestra and two with No Noise Reduction, an experimental project with long time friend and collaborator Paulo Feliciano. Toral performed extensively throughout Europe, Japan and North America, mostly solo but having as well collaborated with Sei Miguel, Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, John Zorn, Thurston Moore, Dean Roberts, Christian Fennesz, John Tilbury and Jim O’Rourke. He has also produced rock bands (Pop dell’Arte, Tina and the Top Ten, Supernova, Toast, Clockwork), presented video and multimedia installations and performed music of Phill Niblock and John Cage. His installations usually have an interactive and unpredictable behavior, often using processing of generative feedback systems, such as “Toyzone” (a piece with modified electronic toys, custom relay circuits and multiple sensors), the mixed-media installation produced in collaboration with Paulo Feliciano for “Sonic Boom – the Art of Sound”, at the Hayward Gallery in London, 2000, or “Echo Room”, a piece for delayed feedback random sound filtering, recently at the ICC in Tokyo. Nuno Rebel : Guitar player, sound explorer, improviser, composer, doing some things with video too. Coming from a background of playing in pop-rock bands in the 80′s (i was the leader of Mler ife Dada, one of the most innovative Portuguese bands of that time), I’ve composed a lot of music for contemporary dance, theatre, cinema, etc, since the 90′s. In the context of free improvisation, I’ve played with some great musicians such as Peter Kowald, KatoHideki, Shelley Hirsch, Gianni Gebia, Paolo Angeli, Massimo Zu, Damo Suzuki, Le Quan Ninh, Eric M, John Bisset, Philippe Aubry, Carlos Zingaro, Jean-Marc Montera, Dj Olive, Audrey Chen, Joan Saura, Agusti Fernandez, Xavier Maristany, Liba Vilavechia, Rodrigo Amado, AmericoRodrigues, Carlos Bechegas, Ernesto Rodrigues, just to name a few… I also played in an unforgettable presentation of Cobra, directed by John Zorn himself. I’ve been playing in improvisation performances with dancers such as Mark Tompkins, Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, David Zambrano, Frans Poelstra, Julyen Hamilton, Boris Charmatz, Joao Fiadeiro, Vera Mantero, Kirstie Simson, Patricia Kuypers, Mathilde Monnier, Christian Rizzo, etc. In this context I participated on Mark Tompkins projects “On the edge” (Paris, Strasbourg and Marseille, 1998) and “En Chantier” taking place in Paris in different moments from 2001 to October 2004 and on Lisa Nelson’s project “Tuning Scores” (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2003). Also with Mark Tompkins, we’ve been teaching the workshop “audible movement, visible sound” which focus the contamination of performing movement and sound making in a context of real time composition. Although i’m no longer in the board of directors, I’m still an active member of Granular, an association for the development of experimental music in Portugal. Carlos Bechegas, flutist, improviser and composer, born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1957. After Art School studies he began teaching Visual Education in 1975. Started his artistic activities in 1977 on various fields of expression. He, playing also sax (soprano and alto) for more then ten years, performed in a jazz-rock group and in a Swing Orchestra, formed in 1980 his own bebop quartet and played also in a contemporary jazz sextet. Between 1983/87 he participated in the Carlos Zingaro trio ´Plexus´ and took part in two Portuguese’s singers projects. After finishing his studies at the Lisbon Conservatory Classic Music (flute and composition) he participated in Jazz and Improvised Music workshops with Steve Potts, John Tchicai, Kent Carter, Oliver Johnson, Takashi Kako, Carlos Zingaro, Maggie Nichols, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Richard Teitelbaum, Peter Kowald and studied contemporary classic composition with Emmanuel Nunes; flute extended technics with Pierre Ives Artaud; theatre and multimedia, taking part also in performances with Italian double bass player Fernando Grillo; worked with the English theater ensemble ´Welfare State International´ and with the German music performer Frank Kollges. In 1987, he initiated his flute solo concept with electronics (real-time control by pitch to midi converter), which he is continuously developing and presenting on stage (solo concerts/performances, acoustic – extended technics; electronics real-time control; improvisation with quadraphonic tape; musical theatre pieces). Between 1989/93 he created and produced three multimedia-performances which he was invited to perform with the ´Welfare State International´ group for the ´International Theatre and Dance Lisbon Festival´. He composes also music for multimedia-performances and architecture television programs, choreography’s and dance-videos. Having worked for four years in Music and Drama therapy with handicapped children he organized in 1993/95 two Improvised Music Meetings and held workshops on Improvisation and Composition with new technologies. Recently he began to curate photographic exhibitions and created the ´forward.rec´ label on which he released now ´Open Secrets´ (duo with Peter Kowald). He participated in concerts and festivals in Portugal and abroad, namely in duo with Carlos Zingaro in Moscow; performance with the mimic Teresa Ricó in Venezuela; at the ´International Macau New Music Festiva´l; played solo and with his trio ´IK*Zs ( 3 )´ in P. Humbria Spain Festival; III Instant Chavirés Improvised Music Meeting; member of the ´Global Jungle Orchestra´ with Hamid Drake, John Stublefield, Grahm Haynes and C. Zingaro; solo participation in the main solo Fonotecafile Lisbon with D. Bailey, S. Lacy, E. Parker, C. Zingaro, H. Reichel. Since 1998 he played duo concerts with doublebass player Peter Kowald (´Ó da Guarda Improvised Music Festival´), with Derek Bailey (Porto´s ´Serralves Jazz Festival´, and in trio with Phil Minton and Han Bennink (´Co-Lab Improvised Music Meeting´). ´Open Secrets´ CD-release concert with Peter Kowald at Lisbon Goethe Institut. Bernardo Devlin is a member of the fantastic Portugues experimental band Osso Exótico. Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta has been considered an important musician, architect, photographer and intermedia artist in the beginning of the third millennium – according to statements written by personalities like John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Merce Cunningham, René Berger, Daniel Charles, Dove Bradshaw , Phill Niblock or William Anastasi among others. His works are included in some of the most expressive art collections and world-wide recognised institutions like the Whitney Museum of New York, the ARS AEVI Contemporary Art Museum, the Biennial of Venice, the Computer Art Museum of Seattle, the Kunsthaus of Zurich, the Durini Contemporary Art Collection, the Bibliotèque Nationale of Paris and the MART – Modern Art Museum of Rovereto and Trento among others. He develops music, architecture and urban projects using Virtual Reality and cyberspace technologies. His concerts of music integrating visual art have been performed in various countries in the last thirty years. An important moment was his great concert at the Biennial of Sao Paulo, for four large orchestras, in 1985, side by side with John Cage, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Robert Raushemberg among others. Among his many celebrated projects around the world there are ZYKLUS, also in 2005, which had an audience estimated in more than 300,000 people along 15 days of continuous performance at the city of Locarno, in Switzerland; DEEP OCEAN, in 2005, also in Switzerland, in Lausanne, near Geneva, at the EPFL Technology Institute, with the support of NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of the United States; DR. JEKYLL AND MR. X, in 2004, based on the film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in its 1932 version, in Naples, Italy; ABELL2218, at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York City in 2004; KIRKOS – A Dialogue Between Marcel Duchamp and Josqin des Près, in Naples, in 2004; RAWWAR in Portugal, in 2005; Leonardo – on Leonardo da Vinci’s works in Switzerland, in 2007, and many more. His works are included in the Universalis Encyclopaedia (Britannica) since 1991, in the Sloninsky Baker’s Music Dictionary (Berkeley), the Charles Hall’s Chronology of the Western Classical Music. Legendary musicians like John Cage, David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, John Tilbury, Christian Wolff, Martha Mooke, John DS Adams, Maurizio Barbetti, Michael Pugliese, Umberto Petrin, Susie Georgetis, Audrey Riley and the Manhattan Quartet among others have performed his compositions. He collaborated with John Cage, as commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham, from 1985 until his disappearance in 1992. He remains commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham in New York. Not only, he has been composer for several companies like the Appels Company in New York among others. His concerts have been performed in some of the most prestigious theatres all over the world, like the Lincoln Center and The Kitchen in New York; the Opera Garnier or the Theatre de La Ville in Paris; the Shinjuku Bunka Center in Tokyo, the Montpellier Municipal Theatre, the Festival of Aix en Provence, the Modern Art Museum in Sao Paulo, and the Biennial of Sao Paulo among others. Articles on his works have appeared in different newspapers and magazines, like the New York Times, Le Monde, Le Parisien, O Estado de Sao Paulo, O Expresso, and O Globo, Il Sole 24 Ore, la Reppublica, among others. With more than four hundred musical compositions already recorded, twenty published compact discs, four cd-roms, he has wrote and published about thirty books, several of them individually, and several papers. His works have been regularly published in England, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy and Spain. He has also been curator for various institutions, like the Biennial of Sao Paulo, in Brazil; the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Portugal; the Triennial of Milan, in Italy; and the Belem Cultural Centre, in Lisbon, among others. In the early 1980s Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept virtual architecture, later largely used in universities all over the world. Since the end of the 1970s he has developed graphical musical notations inside virtual environments. He won the National Marketing Prize in 1977 by the Brazilian Association of Marketing; the APCA Prize in 1986 by the Art Critics Association of Sao Paulo; and the Lac Maggiore Prize in 1994 by the Lombardia Regional Government, the International Association of Art Critics, the Unesco and the Council of Europe, in Locarno, Switzerland. In 1993 his works were selected by the Unesco, in Paris, as one of the most representative intermedia researchers of the world. He is member of the SACD – Societè des Autheurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in Paris since 1991. He also is an active member of the European Environmental Tribunal, in London, where he has been member of the board since 1995. He is an active member of the New York Academy of Sciences, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC and of the ASMP – American Society of Media Photographers. He is member and advisor of the AIVAC – Association Internationale pour la Video dans les Arts et la Culture, in Locarno, Switzerland. He was a founding member of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry – ISIS Symmetry, in Budapest. He is member of the jury of the BES Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation of New York, the Luso American Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) since 1995. He was Editorial Director of the art and culture magazine RISK Arte Oggi, in Milan, from 1995 to 2005. He is also member of the Advisory Editorial Board of the science magazine Forma, in Tokyo, Japan; and of the art and philosophy magazine Techoetic Arts, in Bristol, England. He studied with Hans Joachim Koellreutter (Paul Hindemith, Hermann Scherchen, Marcel Moyse), Demetrio Lima (Jean Pierre Rampal), Eduardo Corona, Eduardo Kneese de Mello (Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius), DecioPignatari, Holger Czukai (Karlheinz Stockhausen), Conrado Silva (Olivier Messiaen) and RotiNielba Turin (Haroldo de Campos) among others. He took part in various workshops and master classes with Kenzo Tange, Oscar Niemeyer, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Charles Moore among others. Mr. Pimenta has been frequently invited, as professor and lecturer, by several institutions, among then the universities of New York, Lisbon, Florence, Georgetown, Lausanne, Tsukuba, Sao Paulo, Palermo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Monte Verita Foundation in Switzerland and the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel. He his director of the contemporary music festival HOLOTOPIA, in Naples. He is also founder and director of the Arts, Sciences and Technology Foundation – Observatory, in Trancoso, Portugal.
Emanuel Pimenta lives in Porto Ronco, Switzerland, near Locarno – but he is also based in New York and Lisbon. Vitriol are Carlos Santana born in 1967 in Lisbon, Portugal and uses computer, microphones, piezos and electronics in his improvised works,and Paulo Raposo is a sound and media artist interested in exploring intersections between sound and image and sound and architecture. Raposo studied philosophy and cinema and has exhibited and performed his work in France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and United States. In the early nineties he founded the electronic music project Vitriol which remains active. Vitriol ongoing work puts an emphasis in the displacement of various sound sources as objects, acoustic instruments or architectural spaces, using computer and custom-built software to create abstract organic landscapes. Carlos Zingaro undertook classical music studies at the Lisbon Music Conservatory from 1953 to 1965, and during the two years 1967/68 he studied church organ at the High School of Sacred Music. Also, during the 1960s, Zingaro was a member of the Lisbon University Chamber Orchestra. In 1967 he formed Plexus, the only Portuguese group at the time to have developed a new musical approach based on contemporary music, improvisation and rock; the group recorded a 45rpm single for RCA-Victor in 1968. From 1975 onwards Carlos Zingaro has performed with a wide variety of improvising musicians, including: Barre Phillips, Daunik Lazro, Derek Bailey, Joëlle Léandre, Jon Rose, Kent Carter, Ned Rothenberg, Peter Kowald, Roger Turner, Rüdiger Carl, Dominique Regef, Evan Parker, Günter Müller, Andres Bosshard, Jean-marc Montera, and Paul Lovens. In 1978 he was invited by Wroclaw Technical University in Poland to participate in the 1st Instrumental Theatre Meeting, and in 1979 he won a Fulbright Grant and was invited by the Creative Music Foundation in Woodstock, New York to participate in meetings, classes and performances with such composers as Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Leo Smith, Tom Cora and Richard Teitelbaum (a regular collaborator). He also gave lectures on New Notation Concepts, Movement and Sound, and the inter-relationship of Improvisation and Body Attitude. As a soloist, or with other musicians and composers, Carlos Zingaro has performed at many of the most important new music and improvising festivals in Europe, Asia and America. A substantial level of Carlos Zingaro’s musical activities are associated with theatre, film and dance. In 1975 he completed Stage Design studies at the Lisbon Theatre High School and later served on the board of directors of the School. From 1974 to 1980 he was musical director for the Lisbon-based theatre group Comicos, being responsible for most of the original music scores performed during the period. In 1981 Carlos Zingaro received the Portuguese Critics Award for best theatre music and in 1988 he worked with the Italian theatre director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti on his Kafka Trilogy. He has also been stage and costume designer for several other theatre productions. He has produced several film scores and worked extensively with dancers and dance companies such as the Gulbenkian Dance Company, the Opéra de Genève Dance Company, Michala Marcus, Aparte, and Olga Roriz.
Carlos Zingaro was a founding member of the Lisbon-based art gallery Comicos, his work has been exhibited, and he has received several prizes for his cartoons, comics and illustrations, samples of which can be seen on a number of CD sleeves, for example, Musiques de scène. Manuel M. Mota is a guitarist born in Lisbon, with public activity since 1989. From that to 1997 he studies and experiments with prepared guitar, mainly acoustic. Since then his interests shifted to the development of a personal language for fingerstyle electric guitar and started working in a regular basis with bassist Margarida Garcia. Also, a lot of acoustic guitar has been played at home in the last years. Collaborated closely with Sei Miguel from 1997 to 2005. Founds the record label Headlights in 1998. José Oliveira hailing from historical city Lisbon, José is a long time musician and (visual) artist. Primarily interested in percussion arts, improvising with many instruments and “instruments”, José has created for himself and others to enjoy, a very diverse and unique musical and art career. Way Out : New Music From Portugal vol.1 was released on cd by Ananana (HHH001) in 1997. Big thanks to Orbis Tertius for this.

Tracks:

1. No Noise Reduction – On Air
2. Nuno Rebelo – Pink Pong
3. Carlos Bechegas – Odnora-Japan
4. Bernardo Devlin – Eye Of The Tiger
5. Albrecht Loop – Alkaline #1 Low
6. Emanuel Dimas Pimenta – Ware
7. Luís Desirat – COV34
8. Vitriol – Rizoma Nocturno
9. Genoveva Faísca – Torch Song
10. Rafael Toral – Liveloops
11. Carlos Zíngaro – Blood Pool
12. João Paulo Feliciano – Colstink Blues
13. Manuel M. Mota/José Oliveira – Teufel Musik

Link removed on request of Ananana

enjoy