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Quatre fois is a text composition [textkomposition] which consists of five keywords in French which respectively mean “birth,” “shadow plays/light plays,” “shards,” and “dust.” They are distributed on the 2D space of a large white sheet, in different grey-to-black shades. This graphic art is intended to be rendered into sounds on some temporal span. The keyword sequence is to be repeated 4 times (thence the title), each time in a shorter, more stressed way.
There are no further directions for performance, although it does exist as a fully written score for contrabass recorder – originally intended to be performed by the composer.
This work was played in some venues in the 1980’s, but it gained more visibility from 2015 onward as one of the main pieces of the repertoire of Artesanato Furioso, a group of artists (mostly musicians) based in the city of João Pessoa, in the Northeast of Brazil.
This album gathers eight versions of the piece, realized over a time span of seven years (2015-2021), either by individual performers or groups. The performances range from straight electronic music to entirely acoustic output. The album includes a live version by Artesanato Furioso, a recording by the experimental group Uvulas Ardientes – which played Quatre fois many times in the 1980’s and reformed online especially in 2020 for this edition – , and the world premiere of the contrabass recorder version. The producers , Didier Guigue and Luã Brito, intended to put side by side the most varied instantiations of the piece, in order to highlight the plasticity and flexibility of the concept.
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