OUW020 : Mutantes Melancólicos / A Partir Del Silencio De Un Paraíso Artificial

 

Cover art by Gustavo Madrid

OUW020 : Mutantes Melancólicos / A Partir Del Silencio De Un Paraíso Artificial

Burning restraint. Renewed frenzies of experienced sensuality. Everything must be credited to the contingencies of the poetic fury. Opened up again are the doors to the absurd, to the irrational, to the spontaneous, to the unexpected. Such as an exquisite corpse, everything is built from clippings, remnants, bits and pieces, or grafts. Slices of sounds, of melodies, gestated by free association and improvisation, meet, get piled up and are intertwined. The vibrant multitude of tones resonates to offer a dance with neither age nor timing. Randomness in the conception isn't an obstacle to burst open the senses and to surprise the wisest of the skepticals.

Who said that collage techniques are useful just for the visual arts? Who said that improvisation and spontaneity are useful just to perform jazz music? Who said that synthesizers and computers are useful exclusively to compose and record electronic music? Who said that a piece of metal, a plastic tube, a glass of wine or a couple of stones aren´t musical instruments? Who said that the rusty strings of an old guitar, covered with dust and fluff, can´t invite to hum a memorable melody? Who said that stealing a single sound is an intellectual property crime when fusing it with other sounds, together they generate a new and unpublished timbre? Who said that music must obey linearity and sequencing rules? Who said that piling up sounds and melodies isn´t a compositional technique? Who said that mutilating recognized and respected poems is a sacrilege? Who said that a lonesome man can´t create such a massive wall of noise? Who said that recipes for expression and creativity do exist?

An invitation to musicalize a poem by Richard Brautigan served as the starting kick for this project. Having only one week to compose the music, create the arrangements and record the song, was a great challenge. Each one of the parts that integrate this song was recorded over one single Saturday afternoon. On the next day, the structure of the song was conceived and arpeggios, sounds and effects were overlapped, with the help of digital edition tricks. Vocals were recorded one day after that. During that week the guests who made their long-distance contributions from abroad or from other provinces, sent their recordings to add that special touch of theirs that can be heard all over the album.

The experience was so stimulating and enriching that Mutantes Melancólicos (see also ODG034) rebirth from the ashes couldn't be prevented. Their creative energy, their youthful spirits and their impudence served to dare to deal with classic poems, manipulate and adulterate them to create an unusual project in a musical career without a fixed course.  

Just five months later, eight new songs – close to a sound graft that flirts with the fusion of intergalactic spaghetti western and surrealist poetry – gave place to a spontaneous record, neither planned, nor projected. However, in anticipation.

As many of the music parts were found pieces which were then overlapped – sometimes inserted or interlaced, to create the album cover for this album some images of a deserted landscape – that were stimulating enough to stick to those sounds – were taken off a profile from a well known social network´s website. With no guilt at all, colours were altered, shapes were intertwined, and completely new images of artificial paradises´ landscapes were created, again, by the grace of digital edition gimmickry.

Composed, performed, produced and recorded by Gustavo Madrid (see also ODG118 and ODG142) between the months of June and December 2022 at El Rosario with collaborations from: Omar Scavone, Jorge Pablo Almejún, Christophe Gallien, Philippe Heywang, Leo Kaplan, Christian Zerba, Juan Ignacio Ferreres and Marcelo Pérez.

"The album´s title became evident to me while I was reading an art history book on the surrealist movement, an artistic avant-garde movement that I started enjoying during my teenage years when I got to know paintings by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst on the catalog from an exhibition organized by the company where my mother worked at. Years later, when I studied Art History while studying Graphic Design at the Facultad de Arquitectura Diseño y Urbanismo at the University of Buenos Aires, I was introduced to the oneiric world of these fascinating artists that not only dedicated their lives to graphic arts but also to literature, poetry, cinema and theater. Always looking forward to expressing, in every way they could, the real functioning of thinking, without the compelling intervention of reason, without worrying neither for the esthetics nor for the morality of their production. 

The song “La horca del sueño de la cama doble” was composed, arranged and recorded in one week for the BRAUTIGAN FEST VII, as an answer to the invitation of Nicolás Domínguez Bendini and served as an inspiration for the creation of this album.

The following poets were the origin of these songs: Richard Brautigan (The double-bed dream gallows), Paul Éluard (Finir), Federico García Lorca (Llagas de amor), Julio Cortázar (Cantos argentinos), William Blake (The tyger), Raymond Queneau (À partir du désert), Antonin Artaud (Poète noir), Paul Verlaine (Spleen)."

Gustavo

Digital release on the 2nd of January 2024.

Track listing:

1: Cantos argentinos

2: El tigre

3: Llagas de amor

4: Poeta negro

5: Terminar

6: La horca del sueño de la cama doble

7: Hastío

8: A partir del desierto

Itunes, Spotify, etc.:

https://bfan.link/a-partir-del-silencio-de-un-paraiso-artificial

And on Bandcamp: