Um Piano Nas Barricadas

Release Date: 2016
Label: Discrepant
Format: LP and Digital
Some Rights Reserved

Master of an ever growing unique sound language, his history already holds several chapters and incarnations. We’ve walked beside him through rock’s threshold, followed his influent work at Merzbau label and stood spectators over this brilliant outcome, where the piano is the heart of a body in constant evolution. We’ve grown accustomed to a creative and even personal search, in the path to the unknown, which frequently delivers moments of discovery and sharing. Ever since a long distant 2006, the process has been rooted through almost a dozen solo records or embracing inspiring collaborations.

What makes Tiago Sousa an isolated example approaching this instrument is the natural detachment from styles and expectations. Too mixed for the classical school canon, in him we listen vaguely jazzistic elements, references gathered in ancient eastern philosophy and a multitude of entangled worlds. Though intimate, the subtleness and magnitude of the emotional implosion of his pieces have no other habitat than universality. Therefore, it’s a genuinely free and liberating genre at its widest dimension, revealing the dream-like curtain proudly flattering the telluric stage.  It’s the deepening and surrender in us towards reality which make him a virtuous at the ability to enumerate silences and their advantages as a score in composing. Finally, the musician’s socio-political conscience makes him a discrete, but assertive active artist, whose work «Coro das Vontades» (performed in 2012 at Teatro Maria Matos and edited this year in CD format) is, no doubt, his greatest accomplishment. One hand covered in dirt and the other in blood, Sousa’s fingers find each key, each note and each image, in a landscape probably giving birth to a new world.

In «Samsara», he crystallized ideas and conceived one of the most passionate registries emerging from the Portuguese scene over the last years. As simple as that. With «Um Piano nas Barricadas», he brings us new and promising horizons, rising through an instrumental diversity’s richness. Here we can find the clarinet’s melody, percussion’s rhythm, classical guitar’s warmth or the harp’s dreamy universe.

The sensitivity in connecting these points reserves the unexpected and the revealing. Yes, it all starts at the piano but, from there, a surprising journey to the listener is born. The result is deranged from what we have come grown accustomed to in his work. And at this moment nothing could make more sense in the career of someone who already left quite an exquisite legacy of his own. NA

Composed and produced by Tiago Sousa
Tiago Sousa plays Piano and Harmonium (#01)
Ricardo Ribeiro plays Clarinete Bass (#04) and Soprano (#01)
Baltazar Molina plays Percussion (#01 and #04)
Tó Trips plays Guitar (#05)
Rebecca Roth plays Harp (#08)
All tracks recorded at Namouche (Lisbon) except Insónia recorded at home by Rebecca Roth