Vasco Mendonça & Drumming GP

This showcase presents, in partnership with the Holuzam label, the album Play Off, which documents the working relationship between the celebrated Drumming GP, a percussion group based in Porto, and its resident composer in the last two years, Vasco Mendonça, with a career already filled with commissions and presentations in several of the most prestigious contemporary music festivals in the world.

In Play Off's music, the idea of mechanism and precision as conductive threads is notorious, even if one feels the openness, freedom and space for expressivity and subjectivity – sensations that match the more explicitly political tenor of some of the pieces and Vasco Mendonça's growing concerns with the possibilities and impossibilities of dialogue; Play Off is also the transposition of the idea of the game underlying attempts at understanding between peers, the establishment of rules and regularities, and the need to break them, evade them, and adapt them in order to evolve. The music here is precisely that lyrical and living organism that feeds on predictability but seeks, promotes, and needs the friction and interrogation offered by its own traps.

Vasco Mendonça: composition, electronics

Drumming GP (Miquel Bernat, André Dias, Pedro Góis, João Miguel Braga Simões, Saulo Giovannini): marimbas, vibraphones, glockenspiel, drums, percussions, gongs, tam-tams.

Rescaldo returns to Lisbon, one of the privileged events since 2007 to feel the creative pulse of the country in everything that is unclassifiable and challenging. In its thirteenth edition, for five days (15/02–19/02/2023), the festival will take over as many other spaces in the capital city, with performances that faithfully mirror the diversity of sound venues in its programme. From contemporary academic composition to self-taught experimentation, from jazz to electronic dance music, including unimaginable mixtures and unique collaborations exclusively conceived for the festival, Rescaldo continues to affirm the aesthetic, social, and generational diversity that keeps alive the personal and collective miracle of making, thinking, feeling, and exploring sound in its infinite possibilities.