Sunday 26 March 2023, 2pm
Formosa is composer Adam Matschulat's first major work under his own full name, a deeply personal album of field recordings capturing sounds from kitchens, churches, forests and farmyards in a compositional net of musique concrète that speaks directly to his family's history in the south of Brazil, exploring what it means to feel safe.
Formosa is in the South of Brazil, where his mother's family emigrated from Prussia in the 1880s. His great-great grandfather built a church there, which still stands and where the congregation still sing from 1850s German hymn books. The role of preacher passed down in the family to his grandfather, who played accordion and worked his farm as the patriarch of what remains a pious community surrounded by forest.
The album is made of two-side long distinct compositions. The first explores his connection between mortality and the land, structured around warp and weft of place and conversation. From a distance, the scene appears to be straightforward field recordings of a working farm; of conversations around a table; wobbling German songs with halting accordion on a bed of night-time insect sounds; of hymns once removed by tape static as if remembered, or as a sonic symbol of psychological detachment. Closer listening reveals astute collaging and electro-acoustic manipulations.
The two pieces on Formosa are meditations on everyday connections to home and family, and more broadly on notions of life, death and belonging. It is an album about the significance of our everyday sonic worlds that creates a teleology of place, and a psychological cartography of safety and home.
Adam Matschulat is a London based composer and sound designer. His approach to composition and performance are deeply influenced by musique concrete and Grotowski’s poor theatre. He is a multifaceted storyteller focused in rendering internal psychological research to sonic experience, using field recording as materia prima.
“The composition’s subject is my relationship to Formosa’s landscape; its history, its fauna, its flora and its magic. This is where my Germanic descendants emigrated to in the South of Brazil. The place is permeated with mystery, from its past, from its pious residents and from the land itself. Through the recordings I’ve made over the years I investigate notions of family, safety, emotional reciprocation with nature and what it means to belong.”
Adam Matschulat is a Brazilian composer, sound designer and engineer. His diverse output of sound works have included electroacoustic composition, musique concrete, field recording, and structural noise music. He composes through the exploration of psychological states, rendering sonic experiences that are psychological investigations in and of themselves.
He has worked under a number of monikers, but his first EP under his own full name was released on Cafe OTO's TakuRoku label during lockdown. It was in part a collaboration with the duo @xcrsw (Seymour Wright and Crystobel Riley) and it was featured on Kate Carr’s Atmospheric Densities on Flaming Pines. He was awarded a residency at Snape Maltings through Britten Pears Arts (2023) and he has been commissioned by Edinburgh University to compose an electroacoustic piece for a project in collaboration with the science department in UAM (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) as part of a research on dark matter observation (2022/2023).
He also ran the label Resterecords, on which he released electroacoustic composer Rocío Cano Valiño, computer musician Ain Bailey, among others. As well as his own projects, which include Matschulat, a vehicle with which he explored a noisier palette within the formal structures of musique concrete. His sound work has had international radio play on radio shows including NTS, Resonance Extra, LYL Radio in Switzerland, FADE radio in Athens, and others.
Working under the name Action Pyramid, Tom Fisher's projects vary from site-specific sound installation and headphone based works for galleries and museums, to experimental sound works, radio and music. Utilising a multitude of recording techniques, often aimed at exploring and re-interpreting the seemingly unnoticed and unheard elements of our surroundings, he looks to present compositional and spatial expressions of these phenomena in a way that attempts to offer up alternative perspectives regarding perceptions of scale, hierarchical bias and the interconnectedness of living things. He has performed and exhibited his work internationally and attended residencies in Iceland and the Finish arctic.
http://www.actionpyramid.com/
@actionpyramid
Sunny Graves is the medium through which Latino-British producer and sound artist Simon Williams channels his current sonic output. Born in Guatemala, he grew up between Venezuela and the UK, eventually becoming a foundational part of the then nascent jungle and outsider club movement in Caracas before migrating to Barcelona in the early 2000s. Since his initial releases as Sunny Graves, he has performed at various international festivals (including Sonar, Primavera Sound, Mutek, MIRA, LEV) and independent events around Europe/UK, and has contributed to the development of the fwd-thinking music scene in Barcelona through curating and organizing events with like-minded artists and friends, most recently via the nomadic/shape-shifting No Skyline platform, while also creating sound work for performances, films and installations in collaboration with visual artists. Following five years of pre/post-brexit life in London, as well as an extended collaborative research trip to Mexico, he returned to Barcelona in 2022 and is currently preparing the release of his next record. Both in a live format and in his dj sets, Sunny Graves traverses a wide spectrum of emotions and sounds, exploring the free-form territory that lies between the concrete and the abstract, freely transcending stylistic/formal boundaries while activating the potentials of sound systems as instruments for sharing knowledge, healing and resisting together.
https://sunnygraves.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/sunnygraves
https://instagram.com/sunny__graves
