I'm an Artcademic

My current research interests and areas of reflection are:

• Music technology & digital instruments;
• Music mobility & creative paradigm shifts;
• Music micro-topias and relational aesthetics;
• Independent music, activism & DIY culture;
• Activism & piracy, industry & capitalism;
• Networked society,  online clusterization & collaboration;
• The digital age & content revolution;
• Remix and mashup cultures;
• Creativity in improvisation & originality;
• Boundaries of musical genre & hybridity;
• Music cognition & artistic agency;
• Virtual & auto-ethnography.

Finished my PhD thesis for the New University in Lisbon, Portugal, which focuses on the central topics of interest that inform its development through my inquiries and explorations into subjects pertaining to its central theme. Pivotal to my thesis is the problematisation of the role of Controllerism in contemporary – paradigmatic – musical practices through the MidiMbira. As a DMI (digital musical instrument) and a hyperinstrument developed with collaborators in Mozambique, my ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken in a scenario that challenges centre-periphery models and explores the dichotomy of traditional versus contemporary musical practices, as well as musical instrument playing languages – which I chose to term simply as playabilities. The language of a musical instrument is – in my perspective – determined by potentialities arising from its physical form and constituent parts[1] coupled with practical methods of ‘sounding’[2] the instrument, as well as societal and cultural inputs as to what constitutes aesthetic value.

[1] For example, in the case of a chordophone, the type of material used for manufacturing the body, the size of sound-hole(s), the type and thickness of strings, the distance between neck and strings, so on and so forth.

[2] Such as articulation and inflection of notes determined by the possibility of performing staccato and tenuto, accenting or forza, accentuation, glissando, legato and the such, as well as canonized forms – or styles – of playing having become popularised by interpreters and performers.

Composing and performing has provided me with the experience and motivation needed to write a dissertation which I hope is not only relevant to academia – in the general quest of wider scopes of knowledge -, but is also pivotal in its relevance and usefulness to artists.

Something like that. But, besides an academic…

…I am a conceptual artist. For the last 30-odd years I have chosen sound as my main source and channel of expression, but my background is rooted in the visual arts, and my childhood steeped in the written word. To me they are all one and the same.

Working the following jobs has taught me to compose and to edify; to conceive with a personalized notion of function, form and content. I have worked as a programmer, a formula builder, a restorer and conservator, a musician, a painter, a writer, a music producer, an animator, a video editor, a reviser, a translator, a busker, a studio musician, a live and radio DJ, a selector, a builder, a graphic designer, a web designer, an importer, a music teacher, a composer, and an ethnomusicologist, among other things that slipped my mind at the moment of writing this.

Ultimately I seek to experience artistic expression in as many shapes and forms as possible, and because of that tendency, my track-sheet is somewhat dispersed and touches many different areas. It has always been my goal to shape-shift and to learn by experiencing as many different modes as possible, defining only what ‘felt’ real to me as a defining character worth keeping and repeating. But that is my prerogative…

Where are the boundaries that confine my identity as an artist?

Perhaps in only one matter I concede the possibility of being trapped in a single way of being; it is in the need to create characters with different personalities with which to express different angles of the same issues, often contrasting and seldom in total accordance with one another. Who and how I am as an everyday person is irrelevant, and only the deepest, innermost, inevitable parts of my makeup seep through to my art, which I consider independent from my daily personality.

The pieces are made by the personality I have chosen to embody for that particular series, so that they may be coloured by it, and be different from me. This gives me the freedom to choose new things when I am bored with the old, the ability to give birth and kill, and most of all, the benefit of ‘feeling’ things I normally would not feel.

Why do I choose this way of working? Because I consider that the cult of personality is all-corrupting, and would rather avoid becoming the product, and commodifying my self. Even if the above were to happen in the future, I would in the very least find my freedom within the intricate and vast arrays of expression, by channeling any personality I deemed fit at the moment. And because these personalities are separate entities to me, I see the potential to unite them under familiar groups, or contrasting forces in my work.

In this way I also pay homage to one of Portugal’s most enigmatic figures: Fernando Pessoa. As a child, by reading his work I developed a craving for the interesting terrains one can inhabit between the inner imaginarium and the consensual realities that make up societal norms. Navigating that border, while staying true and connected to the creative offspring that informs all action, is what I can only define as:

fighting the good fight.

2019-2023: PhD in Ethnomusicology – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova, Portugal

2018:  Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova, Portugal

2014:  General Music Studies Specialist Degree – Berkleemusic (online), Berklee College of Music, Boston, USA, composed of the following courses:

1. World Music Composition Styles
2. Music Cognition
3. Music Theory 201

2013: Music Technology – ProTools Specialist Degree – Berkleemusic (online), Berklee College of Music, Boston, USA

1998 -2000: Indian Tabla in the Dehli Gharana with Misha Masud – New York, USA

1998: Vocal Studies with Marie Alphonse (Zap Mamma)– New York, USA

1998: West-African Percussion– Certificate of Attendance – Drummer’s Collective, New York, USA

1995: Graphic Arts & Design – Certificate – Val do Rio, Oeiras, Portugal

1994-1995: 1st level of Jazz School – Hot Clube, Lisbon, Portugal