Gustavo Costa is one of those pro-active figures without whom we suspect the Portuguese music realm would be much poorer. He’s been a promoter of events and a mover and shaker in the Sonoscopia platform for musical activities, including education and outreach.
It so happens Costa is also a composer, and wrote Natura Mimesis (SONOSCOPIA SONOS #032) to be performed by a small chamber ensemble – Clara Saleiro on flutes, João Dias on percussion, and Biliana Voutchkova on violin. His method involves a form of musical transcription traced directly from forms in nature, perhaps making a graphical score from the branches of trees or the studying the waves of the ocean, or recasting the strata in a piece of rock into musical staves. I admit – I don’t really know, but it’s reminiscent of John Cage and his Atlas Eclipticalis derived from a map of the stars. Across two sides of vinyl, indeterminate forms emerge, occasionally revealing new surprises and coalescing into pleasing shapes.
A lot of that aesthetic charm and accessibility might be due to the players, rather than the composition; Saleiro blows like a concerned naturalist struggling to save one poor tree from the bulldozers, and puffs a lot of emotion into the frame, while the resigned melancholy tone of the vibraphones of Dias add extra poignancy to the experience, reminding us how fragile nature can be. Voutchkova is the star performer for this listener, though – we’ve loved her taut and spare playing since we heard Modus Of Raw in 2017, and the astounding record Für Biliana composed by the severe modernist Ernstalbrecht Stiebler. Biliana Voutchkova brings just the right degree of ascetic contemplation to this Natura Mimesis item, offsetting the more altruistic tendencies of the other players; it might be she’s also following the contours of the composition, if indeed there are any, informed by her own instinctive talents – just listen to her subdued vocal snarls and purrs on side one and you can practically see a human being turning into a tree before your eyes. (23/02/2024)