Monday 11 May 2015, 8pm
Guitarist Norberto Lobo and drummer João Lobo bring their band set-up to OTO following new album 'Oba Loba', which builds on their first collaboration, 'Mogul de Jade', with beguiling and surprising arrangements for piano, trumpet, clarinet, organ, electronics and more.
“The music here is hybrid, ambiguous, ambivalent, interstitial and a big surprise for all those who could think that the presences, as sidemen, of Giovanni Di Domenico, Jordi Grognard, Lynn Cassiers, Ananta Roosens, are evidences that there's some jazz, or some free improvised music, going on. Well, it’s not true. Jazz is there, all right, as are multiple folk elements, but there’s much more to ear. It’s impossible to identify every factor, every influence, every reference we can find minute by minute, and that’s good. In this fantastic edition, everything is in a process of osmosis, with the cells uniting instead of dividing themselves.
Each music piece functions as a cell, indeed. All of them are of short duration. Not little enough to become miniatures, but acting as if they were: they synthesize what’s there to say and finish immediately, sometimes abrupt and unexpectedly. Each track is like a scratch, a sketch, but with the supreme irony of being composed, orchestrated, interpreted and produced in a meticulous way. What the Lobos searched was the essential, the essence of forms and sounds, and this record show us the discoveries they made. Ten of them, and magnificent.” – Silent Water
- Norberto Lobo / acoustic & electric guitars, electric bass
- Ananta Roosens / violin, trumpet
- Lynn Cassiers / voice & electronics
- Jordi Grognard / clarinet & bass clarinet
- Giovanni Di Domenico / piano, fender rhodes, electronics
- Joao Lobo / drums
Absolutely mindblowing acoustic guitar player from Lisbon. His 28 years of life have been completely immersed in the most joyous of relationships with music and sound. He’s done his profound reading of the most auspicious and melancholic melodies (a place where Steve Reich, Jim O’Rourke, Paulinho da Viola and Carlos Paredes all make sense together unto one existence), has been deeply enriched by the harmonic depth & richness of the samba/bossa heritage (which he knows by heart), and his composition in both short and longer-form is nothing short of remarkable – a sense of structure, narrative and storytelling complete by a total absence of any tics or theatrical antics, in which every turn is revised and remade for maximum fascination for both musician and audience. That and he has one of the best left-hands around - for a right-hand guitar player. Jack Rose and Ben Chasny said so. His fans include Gary Lucas, Naná Vasconcelos and the tragically defunct Llasa de Sela. We’re yet to meet a single human being who is less that astounded by this man’s music. Living proof that the boldest aesthetical moves are 100% compatible with complete social communion.
"Norberto Lobo is a mind-bending musician, strangely and effortlessly modulating psychedelic ideas to the guitar. But what is wonderful about Fornalha is how he puts all of this to work to wonder about how we hear one thing following another (montage) and how these horizontal shifts can alter our perceptions. The record moves through the listening spaces like a New Orleans processional gathering and dropping sounds, as it winds through different chambers. Bowed guitars that sound more like bright cellos, a prepared guitar that sounds like a dry plastic lute and some sweet vocal oohing reminiscent of Brian Eno’s fried-orchestral singing in Gavin Bryars’ ensemble “1,2, 1-2-3-4” make up some of this processional band." - Eric Chenaux on new album 'Fornalha'
João Lobo plays drums in several bands including Norman, Tetterapadequ, Mulabanda, Going, Riccardo Luppi’s Mure Mure, The Unknown Rebel Band, Giovanni Guidi Trio, Carlos Bica “Matéria Prima”, Scott Fields Freetet, Manuel Hermia Trio, Mâäk and Trance Mission, performs with the danish dance/music company WE GO, and has recorded albums for Clean Feed, CAMjazz, NEOS, Igloo, El Negocito Records, among other labels.
Giovanni Di Domenico, pianist, was born in Rome on the 20th July 1977. Majoring in ‘jazz piano’ at music school - he further built on an encyclopaedic technique; rhythm, harmony and tone are informed by non-western traditions yet equally sensitive to Debussy’s “Préludes”, Luciano Berio’s “Sequenzas”, to the ‘ambi-ideation’ heard in Borah Bergman’s Soul Note recordings, Cecil Taylor’s polissemic density, Paul Bley’s bruised transparency and of course, the most radical manifestations stemming from the underworld of pop music, invariably tied together by his own original praxis. A distinction – one would call it generational – he shares with many of the musicians he has crossed paths with recently, of which we could enumerate Nate Wooley, Chris Corsano, Arve Henriksen, Jim O’Rourke, Alexandra Grimal, Tetuzi Akiyama, João Lobo or Toshimaru Nakamura. Di Domenico has founded his own label, Silent Water, home of an eclectic and occasionally unclassifiable production. He lives in Brussels.
