fernando_manassero

retro futurism and nostalgia of the internet era

Come over to listen to this full night show. A piece about our relationship with music and technology. About the present and the past. with Maxim Lesaux in the sound and Lèa Martinez in the light performance.

Electricity + Do Re Mi / Technostalgia series 2

The second piece of Technostalgia series is out, premiered by the beloved Lovemusic ConstellationsChicago and recorded live by Finbar Hosie

My first contact with music was through cassettes. My grandmother used to take me shopping in her car and she had several cassettes of random authors that she bought but never listened to. Attracted by the cover art, I would play them over and over, and that's how I came to know many songs musicians that I later tried to follow with my own bands.

The title comes from an interview with Pierre Schaeffer in which he defines pop music as a mixture of Electricity and Do, Re, Mi. A genre based on accumulation and excess, made up of fragments from a variety of sources, based on harmonies and dependent on a medium (the tape). Apart from the implicit irony, I found this definition unbeatable!

So, about the piece: Everything in it is in a state of reverie: The instruments play fragmented lines that reverberate in the air. They sink into the sonic magma of the tapes. None of the instruments is complete in itself, but all of them together create a soundscape with familiar sounds of voices deformed by magnetism.

The tape is composed of recording of my old bands songs played backwards. And also recordings of the musicians of the ensemble playing fragments of songs from their childhood. The tape part is actually recorded on a tape recorder and the different sections are played by two cassette players placed on stage. Towards the end, half of the ensemble leaves their instruments to play four more cassettes, which contain the ghosts of different kinds of music, distortions of old tapes and a lot of hissing.

Thanks for reading! You can listen to it in the link in bio

Technostalgia series 3, 4, and so on are on the making. I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers!