Spectrum Awareness is a trio comprised of Inês Carincur (voice and electronics), João Pedro Fonseca (loops and visuals) and João Valinho (drums). The project, which would end up integrating ZABRA Records' colective, has its origins by the end of 2019, with a presentation at Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, within the scope of Temps d'Images Festival.
With their respective trajectories and with distinct connections to music, plastic arts and performance art, the three share an impulse to push, blend and break aesthetic boundaries, turning the process itself into the outcome of creation. It was, thus, natural that the initial focus behind the collaboration was live performance, taking on the contingency that improvisation entails, as opposed to developing a composed, planned structure beforehand. What's presented here is a recording of one of those performances.
There will be a set of atmospheric conditions that are the starting point of each test. The scenography created in the live setting are a reflexion of it, as are the initial moments of each piece. Given the tone, a semi-controled process unfolds, with synchrony at its limit and of unexpected results. Over the course of five and a half minutes, one wanders amidst dense atmospheres, metal in entropy and a shifting drum kick in a somewhat organic repetition that distinguishes the ritualistic tone of an ancestral mythology or the elegiac motifs of forsaken metallurgical plants. At one point in time, a voice is heard, something on the cusp of operatic chanting, perpetually disturbed by indistinguishable vocalizations, hostages of a never ending feedback loop. We're left uncertain of what is archive material and what is played or sung live. Everything arrives at us interstitially, as fragments of a whole which cannot fully be restored.