Here we have a delightful little artifact that I am pleased to share. It's a piece from the Lisbon-based sound artists André Abel and Joana da Conceição who have collected two recordings of their environmental exhibitions on a single cassette. The works, Colónia / Vai e vem, correspond with physical interventions into the terrain of the island of São Miguel (The Green Island) as part of the Azores Arts Festival organized by the residency program Walk&Talk and were commissioned to encourage thoughtfulness around topics of migration and community investment. "Vai e vem" emerged as part of a renovated skate park, covered in fictitious images, shadows of sprouting plants, graffiti, and various signs that it had been roughly, but lovely, used in order to invoke a sense of connection with the transient in acknowledgment of the overlapping nature of experience; bringing to the fore the intersection of our reality with that of those who we may never meet, interact with or even acknowledge in the stream of our own narrow lives. It is a dense spacial concept and metaphor embedded in a flat segment of a volcanic landslide, complimented by the scratch and scrape of cat-clawed guitar chords and breaches of windy electronics that interrupt an imposed solitude like the scrapings of phantoms, or transdimensional beings, etching the names of their hopes and passions into the surfaces that surround the listener. "Colónia," in contrast, is comprised of more defined and definite shapes with bold outlines that nonetheless find themselves intercepted and in inseparable dialog with larger bodies as a means of examining the ontological veins that connect concepts and people to greater truths and communities, acting on the hypothesis that all concepts and matter in existence necessarily constitute a unified and cosmological whole. Close your eyes and let your consciousness flow in and out of these compositions like water through the pores of a sponge.
There are still teal tapes of this little marvel available through the project's Bandcamp if that is your thing.
