Release date: 11 Jul 2025
Label: Discreet Archive
Format: Cassette / Online
We welcome Tiago Sousa’s latest work, a patient, immersive composition recorded live at OUT.FEST, the Barreiro International Exploratory Music Festival. Commissioned by OUT.RA and written specifically for the tricentennial organ of the Nossa Senhora do Rosário church, the piece channels the solemnity of its setting into five continuous movements that reward deep listening. The organ, part of the Iberian Pipe Organ family, is known for its bright midrange and horizontal reed pipes, producing radiant harmonic textures that Sousa treats with extraordinary care and restraint.
What follows is a sustained gesture of quietude. A music of presence rather than performance, built not on narrative arc but on lingering attention. Rather than imposing a form, Sousa seems to draw it from the space itself, coaxing sound from stone and air, allowing the instrument’s architecture to speak for itself. Rafael Toral’s sensitive recording captures this process in vivid detail, preserving the atmosphere and reverberation with fidelity and grace.
In these five slow-burning movements, one hears resonances with Charlemagne Palestine, Ellen Arkbro, and Kali Malone, though Sousa’s voice remains singular. The influence of 1960s American minimalism is quietly present, with Riley, Reich, and Glass serving as spiritual companions. Yet the mood is more devotional than systemic. It is an exploration of stillness, not repetition. Of becoming, not structure.
Sousa’s recent embrace of the electric organ alongside his long-standing relationship with the piano signals a shift toward sonic inquiry and elemental tone. His work remains grounded in a genuine search, open-ended, intuitive, and unguarded. The work is a document of that search. It listens as much as it speaks. It dwells. It waits. And in that waiting, it reveals a music that is neither loud nor quiet, but wholly and profoundly discreet.
Recorded Live at OUT.FEST 2023
October 5th, 2023
Recorded by Rafael Toral
Mastered by Jacob Calland
Thanks to: Marisa and OUT.RA Associação Cultural