Being of a relatively young age, most of my adult life – musically speaking – was spent with one group of artists who I believed to be enormously talented and gifted that already had a relatively well-established name, and with another of upcoming artists which, though competent and apt in their own languages, were not deserving of the praise reserved for the truly exceptional.
Enter Samuel Jerónimo. His debut album, Redra Ändra Endre De Fase, was a juggernaut of musical ingenuity, compositional savvy and a frightening complicity with new musical languages. More than that, it was perhaps the most eloquent response from within the field of electronic music to the excessive abstraction and ludicrousness that pervaded a significant part of the work being developed. It singlehandedly built a seamless bridge (no other work that I know of did so in so smooth a fashion) between classical and contemporary musical formats – both scholarly and popular – that was more than unifying conflicting elements: it was a whole new set of rules, a whole new language. How could this be? How dared he? It would seem at first that such a monumental task could not have been the result of a thoughtout process. The volatile hand of fortune must have had a huge say, for it to sound the way it did. Eagerly, we waited out until he released his second album – hopefully an ill-bred piece of rehashed junk that would prove us right – so that we could readily dismiss the whole thing as the product of unbelievable luck.
Regrettably, we were wrong. Rather than trying to convince us it was all intended and thought-out by releasing Redra Ändra Endre De Fase II – with a super-duper new angle, irrelevant new nuances, the irreverent-and-yet-oh-so-comfortable pose of someone who knows he crushed the competition (yes, competition is everywhere, baby, like it or not) and that he can sit back and let the praise hit home –, thereby smothering every chance to amaze the lot of us yet again; Rima breaks away from every binding stylist trait of Samuel’s previous work and starts afresh, building a new ideal not from scratch, but from the charred remains of what stood as monument to his work.
Where in Redra Ändra Endre De Fase the listener was required to «listen» with utmost care, in complete disregard to the surrounding physical environment, Rima demands no such thing. It is no longer about listening. It became, so to speak, irrelevant: the listener is now only required to let herself go without question. To be engulfed by the massive tidal waves of “Verso I†as if she were projected onto this new space by means of a metric that, although having been applied frequently in recent times, has only been fully realised in very few of those times. The intricacy and complexity of “Redra†or “Ändraâ€, in all their minimalist glory, is still present, mind you, but in a radically different fashion. It is no longer necessary to quickly follow the odd and seemingly disconnected melodic lines, but rather to let them insist themselves upon you, as if repeated infinitely with only one stroke.
Strikingly, Rima differs greatly from its predecessor by presenting itself in a dual capacity that precludes any possibility of judging the whole work as an indivisible unit. Whereas the latter was, lato sensu, a fairly homogeneous work which, despite lacking a definite leitmotif, had both an invariable approach in all tracks and a strong similitude between ideas; the former is rigidly divided into four more or less even parts (“Verso 3†being the exception) that form two distinct groups: odd and even tracks. However, while the approach is the same for the elements in each set, the general construction is expanded upon quite differently on each of them. Take “Verso 1â€, per example. Starting as a highly nuanced and repetitive piece of electronic inclinations, it evolves to a Pérotin-esque organum from a future age roughly at the mid-point. The striking ingenuity of the choral-like part of the track is even more daunting if we allow ourselves to absorb the impossibly rich atmospheres, which are sometimes eerily evocative of Ligeti’s.
When one track is capable of bringing to mind two composers separated by almost 800 years of musical history, something important must be going on. “Verso 3â€, the other half of the set of odd pieces, is brought about in a largely different fashion, albeit sharing the electronic feel of its twin; building on a vast array of almost random sounds of mechanic activity that give way to a peaceful continuum on which another pseudo-organum is built (again, beginning roughly at the middle). This second take is almost breathtaking in intensity, relying on gut-wrenching dissonances that are eased by angelic melodies in a crescendo of transcendental affliction that leaves you gasping for air and powerless to engage in any fruitful activity. It gradually builds into a hopelessly beautiful fortissimo that inevitably collapses and gives way to an almost desperate morendo.
The set of even tracks, on the other hand, relies heavily in a pipe organ like sonority that is used to emphasise a somewhat unholy union of austere Renaissance aesthetics with the epic intonation of a progressive rock piece. This bizarre junction of such seemingly incompatible elements makes for a hugely creative and utterly enjoyable approach that comforts those worn out by the colossal weight of each preceding odd track. Of the two, the most ingenious is “Verso 2â€, which scrambles together a surprisingly large number of catchy riffs and tunes that sometimes even seem carnivalesque in apparel, but both “Verso 2†and “Verso 4†are extremely rich from a compositional viewpoint and somewhat help establish a bridge with Redra Ändra Endre De Fase – despite the enormous differences between the mechanical gait and severity of the debut album and the livelihood, unbridled joy and humanness of both “Verso 2†and “Verso 4â€.
The quaint, artificial, forced division of Rima into two separate entities was a bold move and one that could only have been brought about by a true innovator. By changing the rules of the game, Samuel took from the hands of ignorant scribes the power to judge his work: it can only be judged on its merits now and there is nothing I can do about it. The only sensible thing to do, it seems, for those who have not gotten Rima yet, it to buy it. Right now.
We have now come full circle. The two-subset set of artists I admire has been reshaped, as it is no longer sufficient to describe the work of someone like Samuel Jerónimo, to include a third category: upcoming artists whose potential has been sufficiently translated into musical ability so as to warrant being regarded as exceptional. Pedro Serôdio
DISCOGRAPHY :
Redra Ändra Endre De Fase (2004)
- Redra | 33:00
- Ändra | 11:26
- Endre De Fase | 13:21
Rima (2006)
- Rima: Verso 1 | 09:21
- Rima: Verso 2 | 09:46
- Rima: Verso 3 | 15:03
- Rima: Verso 4 | 09:36
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