AGEOGRAPHY
How shall The Exiled dress to walk through walls? More than a movement in geography, exile is a radical displacement from a known environment to a new and largely uncharted territory. The list of what-to-save-from-a-house-on-fire is a thought experiment about regret, a dialogue between two iterations of oneself. The second one is called The Exiled. How shall he dress to walk through walls?
Like silence, the map of The Exiled is featureless when he starts exploring his new surroundings. Both the passions he endures and its consolations stand out as grotesque. The mundane becomes absurd. His next meal will be uncertain. The scarce companies he will keep will speak languages he can barely understand. He will live with nothing more than what he can carry. He will sleep on the floor. Where will he pour his anger or satisfy his lust? When he comes across his first warm meal, a rare good night of sleep or the kindness of a stranger he realizes that he has mistaken the absoluteness of size for the relativity or proportion for a long time. The feat of The Exiled is not the forsaking of consolation, it's the science of finding it.
The map of The Exiled will sprawl and densify. He will entertain food preferences, he will find more comfortable abodes, he will intervene in favor of his best liked acquaintances. Men tend towards civilization. He will marvel at how walking trails become streets, at how love becomes politeness, at how noise becomes music. He will wonder at the process, not the outcome. The Exiled became forever busy with returning since the moment he first left. Not to a place, but to geography itself.
"And thus it happened in the end that cells arose even in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks, who came forth from their own people, and enrolled themselves for the citizenship in the heavens"
Saint Athanasius, on the death of Saint Anthony the Great, in 'Life of Anthony'
MANIFESTO
"Abba Antwni" is the name of a procedure that employs an array of tools and constraints to easily produce instant compositions. "Sayings" is the name of its periodical output.
As for the tools, Abba Antwni's only sound source is a guitar with a specific tuning. This setup was conceived to avoid the direct use of pre-existing creative work. Admittedly, this is not an easily definable boundary but the choice was to create a setting in which not only no pre-recorded audio would be used but also no preset-based instruments would be employed. The electric guitar is a portable instrument that offers a diverse range of expressive possibilities, from percussive to long -sustained sounds, with a measure of organic correlation between its mechanical operation and the vibration it produces. As a sole sound source, it not only enforces but also enables a departure from a blank-slate starting point.
The sound of the guitar is than routed into several digital effects running on a computer. These effects are managed through two MIDI controllers designed for hand and foot operation each. The output is routed to a cassette tape recorder running a cassette tape loop that is fed back into the system and used as a sound source too.
Abba Antwni's constraints aim to keep it portable and frugal. The whole setup is meant to be carried and operated by one person with ease, so that it can be deployed in as diverse circumstances as possible. The tuning system favours easy improvisation and layering of melodic phrases. The effects and their control are conceived to make this layering simple and to invite the exploration of textural aspects of sound and their interplay.
Another important concern in the conception of the Abba Antwni setup was to keep the creative work restricted to the performance moment. Again, this may ultimately be an arbitrarily defined constraint if taken to obsessive detail, but it was important to acknowledge the creative nature of recording (taken in a broad sense) and conflating it with the performance. There are no overdubs in Abba Antwni's music. Everything is live, as performed in the moment.
Sayings is not intended to be a rigid musical piece with narrative closure. Each instalment is intended to reflect the fleeting set of circumstances in which it happened and to incorporate its constraints. "Sayings" is an expanding record of these moments and, ideally, a winding story of a negotiation between creative impulse and constraint, where each item is defined by its place among the others.
The Sayings' Bandcamp page is not a display or a sampling of a work, it's the work itself. Sayings is a self-aware format. People are justifiably wary of any sort of discourse lauding commercial services, but being blind to the medium through which a creative work reaches its audience is either naïve or deceitful. As a project, Sayings was conceived with the Bandcamp platform in mind, taking into consideration both its benefits and its shortcomings. This is its home and an important part of its ethos.
credits
from Sayings | Adventskalender 2017,
track released October 21, 2017
All music, concept and visual elements by António Duarte
Recorded in Oslo, Norway, in the summer of 2017
DC experimental duo Requiem and UK cellist Simon McCorry make ambient psychedelia together that traffics in subtlety rather than bombast. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 27, 2021
Floating vocals and gentle, off-kilter drums anchor these expansive ambient soundscapes from Ecuadorian producer Paula Acuña. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 7, 2018
This Chicago (where else?) post-rock group builds wafting atmospheric ambient out of slow drums and a shimmering churn of droning guitars. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 30, 2024
58918012’s hatred of piano inspired him to build an entire album around the instrument—which, ironically, led to gorgeous music. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 22, 2023
Beautifully hushed compositions employ ambient keys, tender acoustic guitars, and atmospherics in songs that reflect on the last year. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 22, 2021
