REMAIIN’s Portugese partner festival OUT.FEST (organized by OUT.RA) has made its pick from the open call, announced shortly before the global pandemic of 2020 – Hungarian experimental muscian Gosheven, who performed at their event on June 5. Gosheven presented his new work „Antipodal Polyphony”, and accompanied it with a lecture.
An alias of hungarian artist Bálint Szabó, Gosheven reflects upon structural problems embedded in post-colonialism and ethnomusicology. In a process of decolonization practices, his music is based around tuning systems that sit outside the parameters of the western canon, like just intonation, as a way to break free from western hegemony, raising questions around the dilemma of cultural appropriation from a conscious point of view. A respectful researcher of the lived history rooted in music & sound sources from disparate geographic locations – from the Hungarian cimbalom to Japanese koto or the radiating influence of Wendy Carlos and La Monte Young – Szabó resorts to the guitar and electronic processing to conjure tracks of touching and unhinged hypnosis which escape the tepid minefield of ambient while acknowledging the premises of levitation and serenity inscribed in it. „Leaper”, his debut album on Opal Tapes from 2017 was a statement of intent, continued with Bivaq in 2018 and various self-released documents last year.
“Antipodal Polyphony” is inspired by the ‘Are’are flute from the Solomon Islands, as a heartfelt homage to that vanishing culture. The lecture that accompanied this piece will soon be published on this website in essay form.
This presentation was supported by the”Creative Europe” programme of the European Union.
Photos by Pedro Rouqe and Vera Marmelo.
