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Formosa

by Adam Matschulat

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1.
Side A 17:24
2.
Side B 15:47

about

Formosa is composer Adam Matschulat's first major work under his own full name, a deeply personal album of field recordings capturing sounds from kitchens, churches, forests and farmyards in a compositional net of musique concrète that speaks directly to his family's history in the south of Brazil, exploring what it means to feel safe.

"It's where I call home," Matschulat says of Formosa. "It’s where we spent all our summer holidays. This was a place I felt safe, and was a refuge from life in the city, which I found hard. This album is a mixture of this beautiful sense of safety and also a sense of respect I have for the magic of the place."

The two side-long compositions contain recordings made in Formosa, from intimate moments between his family members – his mother speaking German to his grandfather – to church singing and the sound of family BBQs. It also contains latent suggestions of mortality – clouds of flies suggestive of rotting and returning to the earth. "This album is about mortality, but also the woods – the cycles of the land and our tiny existence around it,” he says. "My grandad is the strongest man I’ve ever known – he's kind, gentle, supportive but worked like an elephant. Until he was 80 he did all the farmwork, then his heart went and he couldn't even hold his accordion. He'd lost his sense of purpose. I wanted to explore that feeling in the recordings."

The album is made of two-side long distinct compositions. The first explores his connection between mortality and the land, structured around warp and weft of place and conversation. From a distance, the scene appears to be straightforward field recordings of a working farm; of conversations around a table; wobbling German songs with halting accordion on a bed of night-time insect sounds; of hymns once removed by tape static as if remembered, or as a sonic symbol of psychological detachment. Closer listening reveals astute collaging and electro-acoustic manipulations.

Matschulat’s family’s farm is surrounded by virgin Atlantic wood, where the trees are protected, and many of the recordings are from under this canopy. Matschulat remembers as a child feeling as if he had crossed a threshold, and the magic and fear contained in this environment. "For Formosa I went and recorded in the forest," he says, "but I've never been there at night. There's stuff you don't want to step on there – snakes and all sorts. I got myself completely wrapped up so I didn't get bitten to shreds, Formosa is in the South of Brazil, where his mother's family emigrated from Prussia in the 1880s. His great-great grandfather built a church there, which still stands and where the congregation still sing from 1850s German hymn books. The role of preacher passed down in the family to his grandfather, who played accordion and worked his
farm as the patriarch of what remains a pious community surrounded by forest. and crossed over into the forest at about 3am, and stood there recording for a long time. In the pitch black – and it is completely dark in there – I began to hallucinate."

The second piece on Formosa is about life, in the form of love for his grandmother’s potato salad, the recipe for which is included in the sleeve notes and which he has vivid memories of his grandmother making for family BBQs. The piece opens with a curious rattling sound: boiled eggs in a bowl of water, giving way to a phone ringing off the hook and the sounds of a household: of sinks, plates and cutlery, and the close mic’d squelching of mayonnaise and potatoes. It is a peaceful domestic scene, where time passes quietly in the production of a meal.

The two pieces on Formosa are meditations on everyday connections to home and family, and more broadly on notions of life, death and belonging. It is an album about the significance of our everyday sonic worlds that creates a teleology of place, and a psychological cartography of safety and home.

credits

released March 24, 2023

Photographs From Formosa, RS - Brasil

Recordings from 2014 -2022 in Rio Grande Do Sul, São Paulo and London

Mastering By Adam Matschulat

Artwork by Oliver Barrett

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all rights reserved

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Calling Cards Publishing London, UK

Calling Cards Publishing is devoted to publishing artists records, tapes, books, multiples and other printed matter that channel a specific focus of the intersection between visual and sonic arts. CCP is putting an emphasis on how artists can use publications as an exhibition space. ... more

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