Jocy De Oliveira - Estorias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acusticos e Eletronicos LP

Label: Blume

Blume present the first vinyl reissue of Jocy De Oliveira's legendary album Estorias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acusticos e Eletronicos, reissued for the first time since its original release in 1981. Defined by a body of singular music spanning seven decades, within the histories and continuing legacies of avant-garde practice, she is without equivalent. Technically, her 2nd album Estórias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acústicos e Eletrônicos resonates through a shimmering body of organized sound, unveiling truths lingering in the shadows, the sins suffered by the Latin American avant-garde, with the actualities of its astounding heights. Oliveira began her career as a concert pianist. She left Brazil at young age to study in America and Europe, before being recruited by major orchestras across both continents, working under Stravinsky, and having pieces written for her and premiering of works by Berio, Xenakis, Santoro, Cage, and Manuel Enriquez. During the early 1960s, Oliveira shifted her efforts toward composition. She embarked on a process of folding organized sounds across nearly every context it could inhabit, blurring the lines between performance and composition, and incorporating diverse media well beyond the world of sound. In 1961, within a collaborative theater work written with Luciano Berio, Berio Apague Meu Spot Light, she instigated the first performance of electronic music staged in Brazil. Released in 1981, during the last years of her country's military dictatorship, Estórias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acústicos e Eletrônicos was met by controversy before quickly sinking from view, heard by almost no one beyond Brazil's borders. Among the most astounding realizations of electroacoustic process ever recorded, it is a series of sonic stories for voice, and acoustic and electronic instruments: prepared piano, violin, percussion, synthesizers, electric celesta, etc. The album's singularity, culture, humanity, and introspection cannot be displaced; like its composer, Estórias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acústicos e Eletrônicos is Brazilian. Its draws on a diverse range of the country's music and percussion traditions, as well as Indian raga structures, and Japanese Shōmyō singing, inspired in part by the sounds of immigrant communities within São Paulo, the city where Oliveira grew up. A landmark classic from the '70s Brazilian electronic music scene. To quote Keith Fullerton Whitman, this is the "lost Tropicalia/psych/free-vocal/ring-modulator freakout/jam hybrid that you've only dreamt about!".