Release Date: Feb, 2011
Label: Immune Recordings
Format: Online / CD / LP
Artwork: Gwendolyn van der Velden
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.
On 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.