Dissipation, flow, forces in flux. With têmpora, I dive back into my musical universe, taking listeners on a journey through dark, gloomy electronic soundscapes. têmpora explores the idea of fluidity and stillness in motion, while being deeply influenced by ambient, minimalist, and concrete music.
This new project, mostly instrumental, is the result of 12 months of experimentation with synths and sound collage. The ethereal atmospheres and soundscapes serve as a representation of the abstract, non-linear forms that constitute the core of the artist’s usual visual work. têmpora follows the raw ideas and textures of my previous project, debris (ep, 2024).
Listen to the songs while reading the text.
The title of the album – “têmpora, Portuguese for “temporal bone” – evokes the Latin expression “ex tempore”, an old term that can be roughly translated to “on the spur of the moment”.
This concept of stillness in motion is somewhat paradoxical in that it combines two apparently opposing forces: the feeling of emptiness and quietude with dynamism and restlessness, which is also something I’m always looking for in my visual work.
But are they really mutually exclusive? In a way, this notion can be applied to our daily existence: even though the body and mind are constantly moving and we feel our lives passing us by, it’s precisely in the most frenzied moments where one can often find a peculiar sense of calm and inertia. Despite plenty of rhythmic and melodic movement in this project, the goal was also to convey a sense of lethargy or even inaction.
At the heart of the project is a dialogue between sound and visual form, examining how the perception of movement — or its absence — shapes our experience of time and physical space. On the visual side, acrylic paint illustrates how two seemingly opposing qualities — stillness and motion — can interact, engage, and resist one another. Besides functioning as a tool to study non-linear shapes, the free-flowing paint is allowed to move organically and conform to forces beyond control, evoking its own dynamic tensions and natural rhythms.
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