VOLUTA

Perhaps a gong is not just a gong. Perhaps a gong is a first visual revelation of the possibility of the sound it produces, which we imagine it can produce, even before we hear it resonate through space. Perhaps the gong is also a sculpture, an artist’s object, and can take different forms, depending on the projected design or the music that you envisioned in mental images. It may even be that the variation of the relief and the symbolism, inscribed there, suggest other signs, which shatter in symbolic meaning a visual and sonorous world, which is played in the transit between the material and the immaterial, the concrete and the imagined, the noise and silence, and a whole constellation of evocations, resonances, rhythms, imbalances, simultaneously ancestral, ritualistic, hypnotic, organic, technological,…

Bio |

João Pais Filipe is a percussionist, drummer and sound sculptor from Porto. Futuristic and traditional. Ethno techno. He has been around experimental music for a long time, he was part of projects like Fail Better !, Space Quartet, Sektor 304, HHY & The Macumbas or Talea Jacta. In 2018 he debuted with a self-titled solo album. This year he debuts in an installation of gongs built by himself, each sculpted in different shapes and reliefs, with simultaneously archaic and avant-garde symbols, organic and metallic, sacred and profane, that he wants a spiral suspension (from the name “Voluta” ), extending the circular trip to delete on his homonymous debut album. Despite the apparent difference – the musician and the handmade gong maker (and other instruments) – it is all part of the same cosmology, in which also the visual artist who seeks with the sound the expression of a three-dimensionality, visionary of a sonority that first it projects in the imagination and then finds its shape only in the instrument that it builds or customizes to access this visionary exercise of sound, either through the manipulation and transformation of pre-existing materials, which in the album materializes through the customized sound of skins and wood , or in the private collection of gongs that he has been building for the past almost 10 years.