Red Bull Music and OUT.FEST present new work by an extremely reputed and visionary American composer, improviser and thinker; Keith Fullerton Whitman is one of the fundamental musicians of the human and aesthetically more progressive electronics of the past two and a half decades, whichever way you look at it. He’s had work released through the great cathedrals in the category, such as Kranky, Mego or PAN, and is now preparing the release of a boxset and a new LP, his first works outside of his independent editions in some time.
Founder of the crucial distributor Mimaroglu, Whitman is beyond a melomaniac – he knows everything and then some about the history of so many types of music. This depth of knowledge gives him endless tools with which to address every type of vocabulary, structure, texture, spatialization, innovation and subversion. A complete artist, focused on sound and music.
On this very special occasion, he will be directing an ensemble of some of the most interesting figures in Portuguese electronic music, each in their own particular spheres.
André Gonçalves has been active as an artist in the field for a long time, be it through his installations, recorded music, live presentation of his automated/procedural work, or through ADDAC System, his very reputable brand of modules and synthesizers. Fluid in post-Bryars/Basinski composition, when he goes on stage with the O Carro de Fogo de Sei Miguel, he almost seems like a cosmic version of the keyboardist from Weather Report.
Clothilde is the heteronym of Sofia Mestre, who in last year's edition of OUT.FEST gave a superb concert on the Saturday afternoon at the Jazz school. Since then, she has stepped onto increasingly important stages, continuing to develop her highly progressive, narrative, melodic and harmonic version of modular synthesis.
Simão Simões is part of a brand-new generation of electronic creators, having gained visibility over the past couple of years. Brilliant in a tonne of ways, he has everything that is required plus and extra dose of future – quality of sound sources, quick reasoning in situations of composition and improvisation, notions of melody and harmony which can be pop or on the opposite end of the spectrum, depending on what’s needed. He drinks so much from so many sources that it is impossible to box him in in a short little text. Seeing is believing.
These four artists will be in a week-long residency preparing this presentation which, naturally, will be a world premiere.