tracklist 

A1. Fornalha (6:36) 

A2. Maryam (5:10) 

A3. Fran (5:08) 

B1. Pen Ward (6:22) 

B2. Eu Amo (10:40)

 

Text by Eric Chenaux

 

“Talking to yourself is more about listening than speaking.” 

Alice In The Cities – Wim Wenders

 

Fornalha sounds more like the work of an open format radio program or some Root-strata summer mix tape than a document of a guitar recital. The image of a musician as DJ is one that allows us to think about the musician as a listener, rather than a performer; listening rather than reciting.

 

Norberto Lobo is a mind-bending musician, strangely and effortlessly modulating psychedelic ideas to the guitar. But what is wonderful about Fornalha is how he puts all of this to work to wonder about how we hear one thing following another (montage) and how these horizontal shifts can alter our perceptions. The record moves through the listening spaces like a New Orleans processional gathering and dropping sounds, as it winds through different chambers. Bowed guitars that sound more like bright cellos, a prepared guitar that sounds like a dry plastic lute and some sweet vocal oohing reminiscent of Brian Eno’s fried-orchestral singing in Gavin Bryars’ ensemble “1,2, 1-2-3-4” make up some of this processional band.

 

It is how these materials are tweaked, by time and space, that makes this record so strange; how one sound or one acoustic space alters and relieves the way we listen and our memory of what we have heard. At the end of the record, following a series of lush filter swept chambers, a dry guitar comes in, playing a chromatically bent lyrical ballad - transforming what we are hearing, the space where we hear it and what we have heard; the lightest ghosts.