The Brasilia Laptop Orquestra celebrates its ten years—so far—of existence with this survey of ten tracks arranged sequentially from 2012-2021, with a second track from 2020 as a kind of coda. The Orquestra, which was founded by principal programmer Eufrasio Prates in 2012, is a collective whose floating membership is made up of electronic sound artist as well as the occasional acoustic musician. The ensemble is a vehicle for live performances that incorporate the idiosyncracies, both acoustic and physical, of the performance environment into the sounds and architecture of its semi-aleatory, interactive pieces. The group often uses liberally-interpreted scores as the basis for shaping the various parameters of their overall sound. If there’s such a thing as what Wittgenstein described as a language game—a use of words according to context-dependent rules that are to some degree flexible-then an Orquestra performance is something along the lines of a sound game.
10 yEars alive is a kind of official bootleg many of whose tracks have an audience-recorded feel to them. But that just gives the album an immediacy that enhances the experience of listening to it. The sounds interact in interesting and complex ways reminiscent of the plastic relationships of forms and colors in an abstract painting, and some of their spatialization—an important feature of Orquestra performances—comes through when heard through headphones.
Here’s to ten more years, at least.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 