Fujako - Landform
12'' Vinyl, 2012
team:
Composed & produced Jonathan Uliel Saldanha & Nicolas Esterle
Mixed Silent-Block Studio
Mastering Frederic Alstadt at Ångström Mastering
Cut Yann de Kéroullas Sleeve Artwork Eric Audoubert
Layout Anne Fontenelle
“I believe in the irony of mountains” (JG Ballard)
LANDFORM, their first record out on Wordsound Digital (2006) and Ångstrom Records (2012) was born in a small stone house studio in the burnt forests and mountains of Portugal, between paradise and the gate of hell, made from soundscapes and beats recorded on mostly acoustic instruments, created in an hostile—yet natural—environment. After the initial production phase in the woods, LANDFORM was then haunted by the voices of several guests such as Sensational, Seraphim, Native, Cheravif and Scalper, as well as by the additional trash turntablism of DJ Urine.
“Apparently, the way to counter-act a black hole is to play dead. (…) blown into a cloud of bongos, bass and hi-hat debris. My sense of depth perception is completely fucked”
ATTN Mag
If one needs to wipe off some nuclear dust from a massive wall of speakers to set up a zombie rave in the midst of the Nevada Test Site this is the sound to play on repeat for a reason.
Nitestylez
Warped and twisted beats threaten to mutilate your speakers, distorted and fractured vocals flit in and out of the mix. (…) Challenging, intriguing, and guaranteed to scare the pants off small children.
Tom Nook / HHC DIGITAL
For those who value such “luminous coincidences” (in the words of Louis Pauwels, of “Morning Of The Magicians” fame), I can recall that on that day in early August, as Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and Nyko Esterle, or HHY and Ripit if you prefer, packed their gear into a decaying automobile and left the city of Porto heading towards central Portugal’s mountainside, it was raining ashes. As forest fires ravaged the landscape all through the country, the sky was a fiery orange on an almost daily basis, and a glimpse of the Plagues of Egypt was offered to our modern day sinfulness. Fire is, of course, a central driving force in the process of alchemy, and alchemy is a central preoccupation permeating these two musicians work; the endless, minute recombinations and fusions of The Great Work are not at all distant from hip-hop’s sampling and reconfiguring tactics, or from the miraculous transmutations of sonic matter created by dub strategies. So, on LANDFORM, hip-hop and dub are explored as techniques of fusion; all manner of sound substances (instruments from various ages and places, all played by the duo in a short-circuit process of “self-sampling”, the MCs voices, the ghostly effects) are welded in a metaphorical forge, coalescing into a form of cosmic mountain-top music. Filipe Silva (a.k.a. The Banshee) is a portuguese musician. With Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, he runs Soopa, a polymorphic entity producing, presenting and releasing any form of music that acknowledges sound’s potential for transfiguration.