André Hencleeday - collaborations

Candura

Founded in Lisbon, 2018, Candura is Andre Hencleeday and Pedro Coragem. Their debut recording, “/I”, was released through GreySun Records (Portland, OR, USA) in October of the same year. In 2019, the duo presented a new composition live at Galeria Zé dos Bois, Out.fest, Amplifest and during the closing of Rui Chafes’ exhibition “Desenho sem fim (Endless Drawing)” at Casa da Cerca. This piece now becomes the duo’s second published work, “/II”.

Rui Chafes writes: “Candura is a mountain. It is also a deep forest, full of strobe shadows and dark roots falling from the sky. This music takes us to a pure and untouched space where time has no beginning and no end, a space for the un-born and for the un-dead. Maybe it is a sound coming from an era before the beginning of the world, from the deepness of time.

Each concert of Candura is a rough and sharp journey (or a dive) while listening to the noise of blades cutting a feathery silence. During this voyage we remain awake, with maximum attention. There is no space for rest neither there is for distraction. Here noise is silence and silence is noise. Suddenly, we hear a primordial and archaic howl coming from this distant ice-cold wind, piercing our stunned fragility. Nobody stays on land during this musical piece: Candura uproots people from their positions and takes them to another place. At the end of the concert, everybody feels paralysed, unable to move. Was it a birth? Where did it take us? To the beginning of everything or to the end of everything? Into life’s turmoil or into the scaring crackle of death? We will never know.

It is a very romantic and terribly positive music, closer to the voice of Nature than to the voice of Man. Maybe between those tumultuous points, between the silence trying to survive and the powerful hurricane that takes everything with it, that is where some inner peace can lay. When this journey comes to an end, we put our feet back on the ground and remain silent, empty of words. Our fragmented bodies have crossed a somber landscape of wreckage, looking for light through the shrapnel. Candura is an inner mountain.” – Rui Chafes, Lisbon, Portugal, 1 March 2020

candura.bandcamp

Photo: Pedro "Xamã" Roque

Candura e Rui Chafes - From Ruin

"From ruin é uma tempestade de ferro e vento assolando um planalto coberto de gelo. O fogo branco faz retroceder a corrosão que invade a superfície suave dos corpos mais vulneráveis: avançamos para trás até sermos luminosos como recém-nascidos. Aguardamos, expectantes, por um fim igual a um começo. Na imobilidade tensa desse tempo suspenso, apenas perduram os despojos dilacerados do vento gelado.

Nenhum abrigo, apenas céu.”

Candura e Rui Chafes

"From Ruin is a storm of iron and wind ravaging an ice-covered plateau. The white fire pushes back against the corrosion that invades the smooth surface of the most vulnerable bodies: we move backwards until we are as luminous as a newborn. We eagerly wait for an end that resembles a beginning. In the tense stillness of this suspended time, only the torn remains of the icy wind remain. No shelter, only sky.” The result of a co-creation that brings together Rui Chafes and Candura, “From Ruin” premieres in Porto at the Serralves Auditorium, opening the ninth edition of Amplifest on September 22 in a collaboration between the Serralves Foundation and Amplificasom. Chafes' sculpture will take part in an unlikely dialogue that, together with Candura's soundtrack, connects sculpture and architecture to music.

rui-chafes-candura-from-ruin

Photo: Pedro "Xamã" Roque

Medusa Unit

Ricardo Jacinto - cello and electronics

Álvaro Rosso - double bass

André Hencleeday - prepared piano

Eleonor Picas - harp

Nuno Morão - percussion

João Almeida - trumpet and electronics

Yaw Tembe - trumpet and electronics

FOR ENSEMBLE OF ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS, ELECTRONICS AND RESONANT OBJECTS

MEDUSA Unit is an ensemble created by the prolific Ricardo Jacinto, a multidisciplinary artist working as a sound artist and cellist focusing on the relation between sound and space.The ensemble expands the original ideas of his solo project (for cello, electronics and resonant objects) that Ricardo Jacinto has been presenting since 2014. This project included the development of an electroacoustic device that, using an amplification system with microphones placed on different points of the cello and a diffusion system with several contact speakers connected to resonant objects. Recorded live,"Umbra, Penumbra & Antumbra" presents itself as a continuation of the initial premises of the solo project but now also focused on the possibilities of hybridization of various acoustic instrumentsthrough an electroacoustic system of resonant interaction, where signal interferences and feedback networks are the basis for a sound that seeks to interpret the specific characteristics of the concert spaces, resulting in a strongly textural music, with roots in minimalism and spectralism.

The outcome is huge, the music is very dynamic, sonically rich and special. Undoubtedly an important step in Jacinto ́s career

credits

released July 7, 2023

released March 21, 2023

Composition and direction by Ricardo Jacinto

Recorded live by Suse Ribeiro and Nelson Carvalho at CCC (Centro Cultural e de Congressos), Caldas da Rainha on the 18th December 2021. Mixed and mastered by Suse Ribeiro.

Produced by OSSO.

Executive production by Travassos for Trem Azul.

Cover photo by António Júlio Duarte.

Ensemble photo by Nuno Conceição.

CD image from “Stand with Gorgoneion” signed by Ergotimos as potter and Kleitias as painter. Greek (Attic), Archaic, black- figure, ca. 570 b.c. Terracotta / H. 5.7 cm, Diam. 9 cm. Fletcher Fund, 1931.

Design by Travassos.

Inferno

for Choir, Orchestra, and Solo Performer by Nuno da Rocha

“Um homem entra no Inferno. Sem saber por quê, aproxima-se de suas portas. Entra. Na estranheza de sua existência, vê-se a si próprio como nunca tinha se visto.”

Esse foi o mote que dei ao escritor Clément Bondu para que construísse uma narrativa em torno dessa imagem dantesca. Queria que a narrativa fosse como uma fina película que envolvesse o material musical. Não que ocupasse um plano de imposição sobre a percepção de quem a segue, mas que oferecesse um pequeno conforto perante a música, que pode ser sempre tantas coisas diferentes para cada um dos que a escutam.

Primeiro, o homem que ali entra encontra um conjunto de vozes — como um coro quase imperceptível na sua mensagem — que o recebe e o traz para dentro daquele espaço. Depois, ele ouve uma só voz. Serena, mas firme. Parece que fala com ele, que lhe é dirigida. Mais tarde, as vozes que o receberam começam a se tornar menos difusas. O espaço é como uma torre de Babel. “Eu pequei”, diz uma das vozes. “Do you know what Charon told me?” [Sabe o que Caronte me contou?], pergunta outra. Gradualmente, o espaço torna-se cada vez mais familiar para o homem. Como se ele já fosse dali. Como se pertencesse ao lugar. Como um sem- -teto após a primeira semana na rua, depois que se torna “normal”. Já imaginaram a primeira semana de um sem-teto na rua?

Aquela voz serena volta a falar com ele. Apresenta-se. Meio indiferente, parece. E o homem que ali chegou e que a escuta vê nela um espelho de si próprio. Através de cada uma das palavras, em cada uma delas. No conforto de sua não existência, percebe que, afinal, não chegou ao Inferno.