Perpetui decoris structura

fixed media

In September 2022 I worked as guest composer at the prestigious EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) in Stockholm, Sweden. It lasted only one week, but the visit resulted in an important experience: in a record in my life, in only 3 days in the studio – from September 20 to 22 – I produced an entire 10'32" acousmatic work for 16 channels, which was premiered in octophonic version the next day, September 23, in my concert at the Black Box Theater of the Fylkingen society. The material consists of some sounds treated from recordings recently made in Brazil of a few percussion instruments (within a Fapesp-supported Thematic Project, then in full swing in São Paulo), but mainly of sounds elaborated on analog synthesizers, submitted, however, to granular synthesis in Max/MSP, and consequently strongly metamorphosed. As is well known, this important and traditional European studio, founded in the 1960s, although very well equipped with modern systems, is characterized by the presence of modular analog synthesizers, with a marked presence of Buchla synthesizers. I couldn't miss this opportunity and on September 21st I worked for hours on the Buchla 200 black knob synthesizer, extracting from it about 40 minutes of very interesting sounds, which became even more attractive when subjected to a multifaceted granular synthesis, sometimes in octophony, sometimes in 16 channels, that is, in a shattering of fast sound fragments throughout the listening space. -

---Flo Menezes.

Flo Menezes (São Paulo, 1962) - Considered internationally as one of the most representative composers and theoreticians of his generation, he graduated in composition at USP (1985), having been a student of Willy Corrêa de Oliveira and Gilberto Mendes. With a German DAAD scholarship, he earned a master's degree in Electronic Composition (1989) at the Studio für elektronische Musik in Cologne, Germany, as a student of Hans Humpert (Herbert Eimert's successor). He earned his doctorate in Belgium (1992) with an award-winning thesis on the work of L. Berio, and postdoctoral studies at several European and North American institutions: IRCAM (Paris), Paul Sacher Stiftung (Switzerland), Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (Italy), University of San Diego (USA), among others. Flo Menezes is Professor of Composition at Unesp, São Paulo. www.flomenezes.mus.br