Ondness and Folclore Impressionista
Live act at maat
Happening during maat Mode 2020, Ondness and Folclore Impressionista were summoned by Discrepant Records for the “Lost Futures” episode in the Atypical Traditions programme.
The recorded output of Ondness, the most enduring alias of Bruno Silva (aka Serpente), sprawls through a cartography of labels and sounds, seamlessly connecting the dots between the legacy of dance culture and corroded futures. Last year, and after a couple of relatively quiet years in terms of releases, the Portuguese lynchpin released the EP Not Really Now Not Any More on Holuzam and Meio Que Sumiu on the beat-oriented Discrepant sub-label Souk. Into this speculative world converge refracted dance movements, a dub’s sense of space, hauntological tangents and what-if possibilities in an unresolved hallucinatory cut up.
Folclore Impressionista are an artistic sound and visual collective formed in 2016 by João Paulo Daniel (sound), Sérgio Silva (sound) and António Caramelo (video). Hauntologists by nature, they believe in the existence of specific hauntological spaces generated by cultural memories and geographies. After releasing Campos Espectrais I and II with Nariz Entupido, two works that are closely related to the operational strategies of psycho-geography, Folclore Impressionista have investigated the subject of “lost futures” – an idea that still prevails as the spectre of the modernist utopias of the past, and with a clear aesthetic of retro-futurism and the spectral television landscapes often present in library music. In 2019 they released Music for Television by the British label Woodford Halse and Remember by Russian Library, with whom they also a new album on – A New Sensation: Music for Television –, already in 2020, that was the basis for the concert at maat.
The future ended a long time ago, or so it seems. We are locked into an ever-growing simulation of alternative past decades, forever rewriting the past to be able to grasp and shape the present. Writers such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term "hauntology" to describe a musical aesthetic preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and a nostalgia for “lost futures”. The second evening curated by Discrepant for maat Mode 2020 uses the concept of hauntology to explore the alternative dimensions of an ancient future by drawing on the notions of temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory and the persistence of the past.
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Atypical Traditions, curated by Gonçalo F. Cardoso, is a music programme that aims to reconfigure our idea of history and traditional thinking to shape a brave new vision of the past, present and future. Taking a no-holds-barred attitude to the past and proposing a complete reinterpretation of the future, artists from different backgrounds and geographies (Portugal, Spain, US, UK) present new musical perceptions that try to find new meanings in an everchanging ultra-globalised society. In keeping with each theme — “Visions at the End of the World”, “Lost Futures”, “4th World Wonders” and “Do You Miss the Present?” — each proposal develops an idea of alternative spaces in which visitors can travel and dream beyond the limits of comprehension.
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Image courtesy of Folclore Impressionista.
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