Anjo Solidão

PORTUGAL
New Creation – Concert
“Anjo Solidão”

Gabriel Ferrandini is more than a fulfilled promise of a Portuguese drummer in contemporary music. The artist and musician went far beyond this territory to assert themselves vulnerable and viscerally curious to the world around him, always with the music setting the tone for a vision of total art, where the poetic dimension insinuates itself.

In 2019, at the BoCA Biennale, he debuted with his first stage creation, “Rosa. Espinho. Dureza.”, in a torrent of energy with scenic dramaturgy organized in three acts: Work, Sex and Love. However, he collaborates with visual artists, develops his ideas in collective improvisations and finds the path and the landscape of a relationship of intimacy and sensuality, full of storms, between sound creation and its physical, visual and performative materialization.

When he releases “Hair of the Dog”, his first solo album, Gabriel Ferrandini brings to the Champalimaud Foundation’s open-air amphitheater a performance that precisely reflects this state of openness to new artistic experiences: with the Gulbenkian Choir he explores the contemporaries possibilities of operatic singing, with the voices succeeding each other in successive loops (canon), raising issues of memory, traps and liberation (concepts related to the Anglo-Saxon expression of “Hair of The Dog”, in other words, nothing like starting the day with a drink to treat a morning with a hangover…).

In “Anjo Solidão” [Solitude Angel], Gabriel explores the contrasts between acoustic and amplified sounds, creating crossovers between his drum kit with volume pedals, sub-bass, low frequencies and feedbacks. In this new experience in the field of musical performance, the dramaturgical conception integrates, with a central role, a sculpture conceived by the visual artist Vasco Futscher. The digital synthesis material is worked by Miguel Abras, producer of “Hair of The Dog”, and Helder Nelson is responsible for the sound design.

Composition, artistic direction, drums and amplifiers: Gabriel Ferrandini
Singers from Gulbenkian Choir: 
Sopranos / Carla Frias e Sara Afonso
Tenor / Sérgio Fontão
Baritones / José Bruto da Costa e Tiago Batista
Digital synthesis: Miguel Abreu
Sculpture: Vasco Futscher
Sound design and operation: Helder Nelson
Production: BoCA
Partnership: Fundação Champalimaud, Gulbenkian Música / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Support BoCA: Direção-Geral das Artes

“Anjo Solidão” is a commissioned project by BoCA Biennial of Contemporary Arts 2021