Tózé Ferreira - Música de Baixa Fidelidade

First time vinyl pressing of Tóze Ferreira's radical sound art performance Música de Baixa Fidelidade, originally released in 1988. It shares its year of release with Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba, another equally seminal work in Portuguese experimental music, though for a long time has remained far more obscured from view. Given the current accelerated cultural interest in lost and unheard musics, it's a curious fate that has faced Música de Baixa Fidelidade until now, and especially so given that Plux Quba was first reissued over two decades ago. The two works don't sound especially similar, though they are built from shared tools and perspectives. Ferreira describes the recordings as 'lo-fi' (the title literally translates as Low Fidelity Music), though it's not a particularly defining characteristic of the overall sound. Minimal would perhaps be a better way of understanding, certainly abstract and non-linear, also, and it carries with it a similar interpretation of space and composition as might be associated with Lovely Music (notably Robert Ashley - Ferreria's spoken word voice is uncannily similar in its affectations), the voice-led experiments of the New Music For Electronic and Recorded Media compilation and Mills College alumni. A common theme across the five long pieces is a sense of self-referential knowingness, as if Ferreira is deliberately - perhaps ironically - manipulating formal as well as institutional expectation: why else call songs 'More Adult Music' or 'This Is Music, As It Was Expected'? It lends the overall work an iconoclastic quality, one that probably reflects the elitism that a composer from Portugal with a 'rock' background might have faced from his more institutionally regarded international peers. That's a battle that may now belong to history, but what is clear is that the results remain sharply arresting and immersive still now, underscored with a sense of the unfamiliar and unexpected. It stands as a measure of the value in plurality and the need for ever widening vistas.