Angola

The guinea fowl - saqué, guiné, conquém, capote, tô-fraco - is a wild hen that resists being confined to a chicken coop. She also resists the wind, the thirst, the crying and the movement… they resist the form and the conformation.

My wife and I have raised seven or eight chickens in our yard. We used to have, among the inhabitants of the chicken coop, two guinea fowl sisters. The poor ones used to get beat up so much by the other chickens that even eating was a problem for them – making their desperate cries of ‘tô-fraco, tô-fraco, tô-fraco’ (‘I’m weak, I’m weak, I’m weak’) each time longer and louder.

Everything in the work Angola (especially in the scope of pitches, but also in the rhythm one) comes from a recording that I’ve made of these wonderful and desperate and sad cries. Screams that give them some of their own names: tô-fraco, conquém. No wonder: they were their screaming; screams like an extension of bodies covered with black feathers painted with white polka dots. After recording them, I’ve processed the sound files using Spear and Openmusic, which helped me getting a series of basic materials to compose the piece.

During the piece, the musicians are asked to speak, recite, shout, whisper a text, written by myself:

Estou fraco
Eu falo da força
de vetar saques
com quem seja ninguém Da sede antes do lago
Do asco antes da coisa
Da água que é já fome
Ou daquilo puro-nojo… Eu falo do salto (antes da asa)
de fazer fugirem saqués A galinha de volta ao ovo
O bico de volta à casca
Do sujeito à mórula
Da angola ao grito:
Conquém!

The text is a variation game with some of the guinea fowl’s nicknames… but it also resonates some of the musical procedures in progress in the piece. So I think these are the two points of (mis)orientation for the composition of Angola: the names-onomatopoeia and the guinea fowl’s cries themselves. Which leads, more broadly, to other ‘two sides of the same coin’, such as sound vs. meaning, gesture vs. form, representation vs. sensation, etc.

Angola is crossed by an involution movement, which causes things to flee from their present forms to a pure plane of forces. Before the lake, there is thirst; before the chicken, her cry; the wind gust before the key; the pure escape motion before the frozen form.

The guinea fowl is a wild hen. She resists the chicken coop. There was no other way for our two little sisters—and those recordings were the last thing we did with them in our yard, before we’ve taken them to Lagoa do Portinho, where they joined other saqués living there. Free. (Until the day they would, inevitably, end up in some restaurant dish around the lake.)