Music
to buy any record use this e-mail: orders (at) tiagosousa (dot) org
paypal, bank transfer or cash on delivery (only for Portugal) accepted. Encomendas em Lisboa poderão ser entregues em mão poupando custos de envio.
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Samsara
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After Walden Pond’s Monk, released on Immune, Tiago Sousa brings his first solo piano record: Samsara. An intricate record, built on a complex narrative that’s anchored on this oriental philosophical concept – a bold and emotive piece that stands through its carefully managed balance between opposites.
Samsara is, for several oriental cultural manifestations, the repetitive and re-occurring cycle of life, death and rebirth; it stands for a continuous drift through the various modes of existence. For Tiago, then, Samsara works as a metaphor for the flux of human creativity and how it influences our perception of reality while at the same time positing new challenges and difficulties.
Since his first release, in 2006, Tiago Sousa has been consistently developing his very own aesthetics; through his relatively large body of work, we can identify an artist on the search for his own expression and identity. Samsara follows two largely successful endeavors, both centered on the piano: Insónia and Walden Pond’s Monk. In between those and this new release, Tiago has been working in the original soundtrack for Portuguese short movie Bibliografia.
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Compilação Bodyspace
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“Dez anos para uma webzine é muito tempo. É o equivalente a um jornal com 100 anos, diriam alguns, é um acto de profunda teimosia diriam outros. Mas é certamente o tempo suficiente para querer sair do conforto do www, meter mãos à obra e fazer com que as coisas aconteçam. No ano em que celebra o seu 10º aniversário, para além de outras iniciativas levadas a cabo fora do domínio de internet, a webzine Bodyspace juntou 20 artistas em pares e convidou-os a criar do zero, esperando que encontrassem novos caminhos dentro do seu próprio trilho. E assim foi. O fruto dessas uniões musicais pode ser ouvido nesta compilação que não faz distinção entre tendências, géneros e proveniências. Antes, coloca-se na posição de maestro de uma orquestra que inventou uma enorme e ampla partitura a partir do silêncio. O resultado final é uma espécie de monumento à diversidade que impera na música portuguesa nos dias que correm.”
André Gomes
01 Stereoboy & Emmy Curl “Little Secret”
02 Memória de Peixe & Octa Push “Kalimbaa!!”
03 Black Bombaim & Rodrigo Amado “Marraquexe”
04 Osso Vaidoso & Ghuna X “Prematura”
05 RA & Jibóia “Esgotos de Mumbai”
06 DJ Ride & Capicua “Hoje”
07 Photonz & Robert Foster “Pulse modulated blackness”
08 Tiago Sousa & Tó Trips “A conquista do pão”
09 Sensible Soccers & blac koyote “Em tempos amei Pimpinha”
10 The Astroboy & Old Jerusalem “You can find a will in me to stay”
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Walden Pond’s Monk
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2011 – Immune Recordings – CD, LP. Itunes
(available at concerts, at immune recordings website and music stores worldwide)
Immune is very proud to announce the release of Walden Pond’s Monk, the new album from Portuguese musician and composer Tiago Sousa. Following the limited vinyl-only album Insonia released in 2009 on German label Humming Conch, Walden Pond’s Monk is the first album from Sousa released worldwide on both CD and LP formats.
Walden Pond’s Monk is a piece that was composed and heavily influenced by the idealism and revolutionary spirit of Henry David Thoreau. The album is a natural evolution of the aesthetics already present in the previous album Insónia, while at the same time it reveals the maturity of a composer who consistently challenges himself.
In this album, Tiago Sousa maintains the same intuitive and spontaneous approach to the piano and remains convincingly impermeable to the normative formalisms of genre and academism. With Ricardo Ribeiro (clarinet) and Baltazar Molina (percussion), Sousa builds a piece in a continuous momentum, anchored on impressionist melodies of disarming simplicity and interrupted by a stormy improvisation.
During the thirty two minutes of Walden Pond’s Monk, Tiago Sousa nourishes a romantic narrative based upon the essential ideas that Thoreau documented in works like Walden or Civil Disobedience: the profound respect for freedom and for the infinite expression of the possibilities of men. An unexpected encounter that outdoes the limits of an album and becomes roundly an artistic and personal manifest for Tiago Sousa. Walden Pond’s Monk stands out not only because of the mature composition work, but also for the natural but yet surprising confluence between the aesthetics of the composer and the ideological concepts that he absorbed from Thoreau.
Tiago Sousa was initially known as the founder of Portuguese netlabel Merzbau, but in the last few years has been a very active solo artist. Always preferring the intuitive approach to music and stepping aside from the frontiers of genre and formal academism, he has become one of the most promising names in the Portuguese musical scene. Before his work with piano, Tiago founded the band Goodbye Toulouse and was part of the collectives Jesus, the Misunderstood, Sapien Sapiens and Macadame. He is also one of the Barreiro-based artists that belong to a generation that created and produced festivals like Out.fest and Barreiro Outras Músicas.
In 2006, the piano became the gravitational center of his music with the release of Crepúsculo. It was followed by Noite/Nuit, a split released with SRX in 2007 on Merzbau. In 2008, Tiago released The Western Lands, a challenging record named after the book by William S. Burroughs, on the German label Resting Bell. The Western Lands gave him his first press reviews, a tour throughout Europe and precious moments on stage with Shannon Wright, Vic Chestnutt and Paul Metzger. 2009 saw the release of his third LP Insonia on Berlin’s Humming Conch label. The album was met with critical praise and was on many of the year’s best Portuguese lists. Simultaneously, he began a new cycle of concerts that took him to Teatro Maria Matos, Galeria Zé dos Bois, Festival Rescaldo and, once again, to Berlin, Brussels, and Paris among others.
2011 will see Tiago touring and performing in support of the new album Walden Pond’s Monk.
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Insónia
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2009 – Humming Conch – Vinyl / 14 € + shipment costs
click to enlarge
1. Movimento
2. Pêndulo
3. Reflexo
4. Insónia
5. Folha Caduca
6. Passos
7. Surrealismo Impressionista
This music is licensed under a Creative Commons License
As founder and main operator of the Merzbau label (pioneering netlabel in Portugal, home to some of the most solid and consequential new names in the portuguese scene, such as Lobster, B Fachada, Noiserv, Frango or Walter Benjamin) Tiago Sousa had always shown an attention to novelty and an healthy disregard for genres or for playing it safe. Merzbau came to an end, earlier this year, having fulfilled its mission and its destiny, with some of it’s front runners attaining considerable attention and even success in the portuguese scene.
Come 2009. Merzbau has reached its end with a feeling of mission accomplished. Tiago Sousa, in the meantime, had assumed a surprising solo career, with the release of Crepúsculo, Noite/Nuit and The Western Lands. Surprising because, and despite the broad aesthetics he revealed as an editor, nothing in that aspect of his life hinted at the direction its own music would take. Far from the indie pop precepts of Noiserv, B Fachada, Jesus The Misunderstood or Mariana Ricardo, and equally distant from Frango’s overt experimentalism or the muscled noise rock of Lobster or Lemur, Tiago’s music took as reference contemporary classical music, though assuming a creative method clearly owing to the ingenuity, simplicity and spontaneity of improvisation. The emotive and restrained melodies he sketched on those records, mainly coming out of his piano, evoke not as much his inside knowledge and living of the highly remarkable last 5 years in portuguese indie or experimental music, but more so his discovery of luminaries such as Erik Satie, Terry Riley, Robbie Basho or Olivier Messiaen, as well as his readings of most of the Beat Generation masters, the political testimonies of H.D. Thoreau and the Situationists or the distant Eastern Philosophy.
So here we are, on the verge of Insónia, Tiago’s fourth record, released by Humming Conch. An album which is almost exclusively fed by the piano, with drums and even some clarinet popping out every now and then, courtesy of guest musicians João Correia and Ricardo Ribeiro. Insónia, recorded in the beginning of the year by american sound-engineer and university teacher Geoffrey Mulder, and mastered by the renowned Taylor Deupree, who runs the 12k label, is, simultaneously, the record that one anticipated from Tiago (or which awaited Tiago), but also a surprising effort. It is, on one side, a certain pinnacle of the work Tiago had been developing, but it’s surprise lies in the fact that, in a way, nothing had anticipated such an accomplished and emotionally-charged record. The steadiness of its markedly impressionistic meanderings, echoing Debussy or Chopin, and the savoir-faire with which it turns simple and small melodies into crafty hymns of spirituality and meditation, show that this is a nocturnal record, no doubt about that, but also reveal a morning splendor and vigor which materialize on the unstoppable and unresistant propelling of tracks like Passos, and hinted at on the several movements of the chosen single Folha Caduca or the opening track Movimento.
Lojas onde comprar em Portugal;
Trama (Lisboa)
Trem Azul (Lisboa)
Louie Louie (Lisboa, Porto, Braga)
FLUR (Lisboa)
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The Western Lands
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2008 – Resting Bell – Online / CD-R / 5 € + shipment costs
This record, released as an on-line release, is also available in a cd-r version.
1. Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast
2. The Road to Western Lands
3. The Writer
4. Waghdas
5. The Valley
6. KA
7. Centipede’s City
This music is licensed under a Creative Commons License
The Western Lands, the western bank of the Nile: The frontier to a vast and inhospitable desert, today as in ancient times – but also, in Egyptian mythology, the Land of the Dead: A space open to be filled, just as William Burroughs work published in 1987, with meaning, an ‘open book’ in many ways, readable from all possible angles, strung together by an ambience which transcends the limitations of chronological ’storytelling’: Juggling with atmospheres, real and unreal memories, and steeped in occult symbolism. The road which leads to the Western Lands, Burroughs tells us, “is devious and unpredictable. Today’s easy passage may be tomorrow’s death trap. [...] To reach the Western Lands is to achieve freedom from fear.”
Far more than an interpretation of Burroughs’ text, Tiago Sousa’s “The Western Lands” retraces itself the journey of an artist towards an unknown territory, aiming not at a ‘conclusion’, but a transition: Just as Burroughs intersects the present with an hallucinatory ‘beyond’, subverting our common notion of ‘reality’, Tiago Sousa’s seven compositions draw upon both the noisy and the melodious, loose rhythms as well as hypnotic repetitions, parallels of equal value which never converge to one simple truth, one simple solution. It comes as no surprise, then, that “The Western Lands” also marks the introduction of a second voice to Sousa’s musical spectrum – the guitar, new counterpart to the piano, the former protagonist of his two earlier works (“Crepúsculo”, 2006, and “Noite / Nuit”, split with french artist SRX, 2007): From the frail harmonies of “The Writer” and “The Valley”, to the harsh and discordant sounds of “Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast”, the sinister melancholy of “The Road to Western Lands” – pieces like “Waghdas”, “Ka” and “Centipede’s City” always hold Sousa’s work in an unsettling balance, never quite yielding to either side, unfolding a wide musical landscape we as listeners can wander in: A musical ‘cut up’, equally “devious and unpredictable”, whose lost part are for us to find: “The most obvious road is almost always a fool’s road.”
The Western Lands – Photo Session by Vera Marmelo
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Macadame
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2008 – Merzbau – Online
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Noite/Nuit – Split w/ SRX
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2007 – Merzbau – Online
Noite/Nuit and Crepúsculo are now available together in a cd-r version / 5 € + shipment costs
1. Árvore Anciã
2. A Espera
3. Folha Caduca
4. The Amazonian Sky
5. Pieces for Portugal
6. Better Than
This music is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Tiago Sousa:
Tiago Sousa lives in Barreiro and is a member of Goodbye Toulouse and of Jesus, the Misunderstood. He began his solo work with Crepúsculo, an unquiet record that has been well received by the critics and by the concerned public. He crosses the use of the piano with the experimentalism in search of a personal expression always with emotion as an objective.
SRX:
This artist with Portuguese ascendance lives between valleys in the depths of the French interior. She got used to the presence of nature and to solitude that became fundamental elements in her art. Not being a gifted performer, Sandara lives of the raw expression of feelings and ideas. Her music wanders between the song and the improvised music with a mixture of mysticism and the sense of belonging. She has released By the way, Ordinary things on the French label Another Record in 2005.
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Crepúsculo
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2006 – Merzbau – CDR 50
Noite/Nuit and Crepúsculo are now available together in a cd-r version / 5 € + shipment costs
This music is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Crepúsculo (Dawn) is the debut of Tiago Sousa, member of Goodbye Toulouse and Jesus, the Misunderstood and founder of Merzbau, using a Piano, offered by his grandmother, between the composition work of new songs for Goodbye Toulouse. The result is a long delicated piece of half an hour that invites you to introspection and meditation.
