Space Elements Vol. II (2010)

“His sound world is both grounded, burrowed deep into the loam and silt, and filled with flights and flares of satellite sparks, calls from the deep in all directions.” (Crow With No Mouth)

Staubgold (Berlin, Germany), Staubgold digital 5 (CD, 2010)
Taiga (Minneapolis, MN, USA), TAIGA 10 (LP, 2010)

Personnel:
Manuel Mota: guitar (2).
Afonso Simões: drums (3).
César Burago: tamborim (3, 6); afoché (3); rainstick, bell, guiro, maracas (5); clave (5, 6).
Stefano Tedesco: vibraphone (4).
Rute Praça: violoncello (5).
João Paulo Feliciano: rhodes piano (5).
Ruben Costa: digital synthesizer (5, 7).
Sei Miguel: pocket trumpet (5).
Fala Mariam: alto trombone (5, 8).
Evan Parker: soprano saxophone (6).
Rafael Toral: modified MS-2 portable amplifier feedback (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8); modified MT-10 portable amplifier (3, 7); delayed feedback resonance empty circuit (3, 4, 5, 7); electrode oscillator with modular filter (3, 7); sawtooth pulses, noise bursts (7).

This is the second volume of the Space Program’s Space Elements series. In this series, each release features guest collaborations and is focused on a kind of instrumental behavior. The Space Program is a long-term project launched in 2004, questioning how to perform music in a post-free jazz mind-set, using strange sounds from electronic instruments. Playing physically, the body is involved in making decisions. The Space Program’s main focus is on articulating silence and sound, structuring musical discourse on experimental instruments with a simple and clear sonic identity.

While finding ways to make decisions on sound emission, it became evident to me that such sounds should have a reason to exist, they should be essential and necessary. I use simple means, and such simplicity resonates in my mind with pre-historic times, when early humans made all kinds of vocal sounds. They were necessary for survival and had specific functions from danger warning and hunting cooperation to nursing babies or expressing needs. Such use of sounds would only much later split into the origins of both language and music. While carrying this feeling of necessity onto our times by setting it on a “post-free jazz electronic music” environment, i try to keep this spirit of pre-aesthetic, pre-language, pre-music essential sound making.

Rafael Toral, 2008

Produced by Rafael Toral.
Recorded from summer 2006 to autumn 2009 at Noise Precision, the Pipe and Percussion Workshops, Manuel Mota, J. P. Feliciano and Stefano Tedesco’s studios (Lisboa, La Spezia), and live at Minoritenkirchen, (Krems), The Toft, (Melbourne) and EMPAC (Troy, NY).
Mixed and Mastered at Noise Precision, late 2009.
Graphic design by NOTYPE (www.notype.net).
Typeface by Mário Feliciano: Stella, ©FTF 2000—2006.
Collage by João Paulo Feliciano: I Dream of Cities in Colours #5 (paper collage, 112 x 74 cm), courtesy of the artist and Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art.