Composed by Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais in Porto in 2013 from original recordings by Luís Antero. Field recordings are something we often resort to, but our approach to them in composition or performance is irregular: if at times we may be very straight-forward and even sporadically quite narrative (at least to our ears), trying to preserve the character of the sounds and most of the details found in them, we often heavily manipulate the sources, occasionally leaving but a faint trace of the originals as glimpses for possible recollection or recognition of the contexts of recording. We may decontextualize sounds, we may build (fictional) ambients or narratives, or we may — and we tend to — approach sounds with little or no semantic concerns, using them in a process of audio collage.

“Noventa e Sete (para Luís Antero)” was created upon Luís's kind request for a remix of his piece “Terra d'Água”. Having nurtured a long-standing admiration for his work we were thrilled by the opportunity to work with his recordings and upon hearing his composition, we quickly decided not to use unprocessed recordings as they were so prominently featured there, but we also felt that we shouldn't destroy the timbral identity of the sounds we would come to use. We therefore decided to focus on a single pair of takes and to built our composition from their deconstruction and rhythmic reconstruction. Having disassembled the sounds of digging, we followed a nondeterministic approach to their reconstruction, structurally reshuffling all the slices to a regular grid. After this, and through a systematic process of addition with multiple asynchronous overdubs, we set in motion the emergence of a mass of sound that was simultaneously a breaking up and an accumulation of parts that evoked the process of digging the ground, of breaking, granulating and rearranging the dirt, leaving tracks and residues along the way.

Our piece therefore starts with a markedly man-made sound, clearly mechanical, steady, slow-paced and evolves to a flow of a myriad of events that progressively become less human, less mechanical and much more organic. As it progresses and the events multiply, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish particular events and the listening experience shifts from focusing on a particular action to a meandering through a complex organic landscape populated by scores of dynamic entities, a landscape that eventually and suddenly fades away, as the end of a summer rain.