Originally commissioned by TBA during the COVID pandemic of 2020 as part of their Curfew programming O Morto, aka Mestre André now presents the full length version of his Lila composition, a collaboration with Moroccan musicians Ayoub ElAyady and Khalid Boulhamam.
Lila is the Arabic word for night and is also the name of the liturgic ceremony manifested in a trance, as a process of healing and therapy, through a ritual of sensory immersion conducted by music (gnawa), incense, colour and dance. From sunset to dawn, seven colours are revealed, associated with different rhythms and stages of ecstasy.
In LILA, Ayoub ElAyady, Khalid Boulhamam and O Morto summarily travel through the seven colours of the nocturnal ritual in all its scope – using both the form of tradition and electronic manipulation.
By now a regular and esteemed presence among the Discrepant sprawling household via releases with projects such as Alförjs, Banha da Cobra or Jibóia, Mestre André “resurrects” his O Morto alias (bad pun somewhat intended) after 2016 ‘The Forest, The People And The Spirits’.
With a diaristic approach where field recordings function as remnants of his surrounding reality and subsequent memories to be processed and recontextualized into an expressionist whole, O Morto expands that previous Discrepant release sonic palette unto uncharted cartographies.
Based on a number of field recordings taken during a life-changing trip to Morocco that felt like a fever dream, ‘Dans La Gorge D’un Monstre‘ reenacts that hazy and hallucinatory mindframe through five tracks where no vivid recollection persists, tainted by the extrasensory feeling of not being quite there. A sonic fiction that goes from the processed cymbals and pummelling drums of ‘The Gorge‘ with Andrés’ mates in Jibóia, through moroccan Gimbri player Ayoub El Ayady and Khalid Boulhaman’s rattling Krakebs on ‘Lila‘ and the slowed down Eccojams vibes of ‘Out of the Atlas‘ to the dreamy aquatic soundscapes and arpeggios of the appropriately titled ‘Princesas Batráquio‘. Comprising the whole of the B side, ‘A Desert of Rain‘ is a slow evolving wonder where gong-like tones drift beneath scrambled transmissions of unknown origin, eventually giving way to synapse inducing drone motifs and scraps of realities collapsing among themselves – fire into water, a jetstream into steps, maybe none of this.
Along with the LP, the release comes with a companion piece tape titled ‘Ifrits Habitent‘, a more impressionistic and unadulterated account of the same travel that could well be this side of the mirror. Then again, maybe he never made it back from the other side. Who’s to know?
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released March 10, 2023
All tracks originally composed for quadraphonic system except for
Track 01: Processed electric guitar by Óscar Silva and processed cymbals by Ricardo Martins
Track 02: (excerpt) Guembri and voice by Ayoub ElAyady and Krakebs and voice by Khalid Boulhaman — Lila was firstly commissioned by Teatro do Bairro Alto to be presented in Curfew—a an online show in the context of the digital programme of TBA.
Track 05: Performed and recorded live at Desterro, Lisboa 15.08.20
Boomkat Product Review:
Outstanding fever dream collage of Moroccan field recordings and curiously pitched synthesis by Portugal’s O Morto - an addendum to his new album that surely holds up on its own, riveting merits - RIYL Metal Preyers, Christos Chondropoulos, Muslimgauze, Sublime Frequencies, Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force
One of many good reasons to keep a close ear on Discrepant and its Sucata Tapes sublabel, ‘Ifrits Habitent’ is proffered as a more free-flowing sibling to O Morto’s new studio album ‘Dans la Gorge d’un Monstre’, itself a follow-up to 2016’s ‘The Forest, The People and the Spirits’. Typically drawing on his background as a composer and sound artist for film, dance, performance and theatre, O Morto specifically applies his techniques to the riches of Moroccan music here in a heavily satisfying hour of impressionistically skewed and warped field recordings that nevertheless impart a strong feel for the sweltering sound fields of Moroccan streets and marketplaces. The results are acutely comparable to Metal Preyers’ similarly spirited incursions on Kampala, also taking the license of Muslimgauze’s sound-scaping, but with a humid sense of actually being there (as opposed to Manchester) that reflects the lingering psychedelic after effects of his time in Arabic North Africa.
With keen attention to the rhythmic psychedelia of Moroccan percussion traditions and polyphonic cacophony of its built-up areas, augmented by a spellbinding taste for curdled discord and bittersweet Non-Western synth tone, O Morto plunges us into his memory banks with a grippingly impressionistic sort of surreality. We are utterly intoxicated from the front by his dense thicket of horns and crowd holler in ‘Marrakesh Vertigo’, and it’s a rare pleasure to follow his logic across the 12 minutes of trampling, ritualise drums and chant in ‘Fais attention, pas de confiance’, thru wavey flutes that sound like a screwed grime riddim in ‘Ali Baba’, to Raï keyboard melodies of ‘Tefout Radio Loop’, gonzoid Sublime Frequencies snapshots of drum batteries in ‘Festivities in Boumaine du Dadès’, and the eerie evocation of ‘Out of Nowhere Ferry Between Ceuta and Algeciras’ that leaves us with the oddest sensation of time travel.
"Albeit his music is now closer to a soundscape composition approach, O Morto (aka Mestre André) actually started as a free improv / noise project in 2012. However, after releasing his debut “Memento Mori”, O Morto slowly began to drift away from the harshest soundscapes to seek for a new direction. He found it under the form of the polyphonic music played by Ba’Aka (a pygmy tribe that still lives in the Republic of Congo), and in a conceptualised image of Jengi - a forest spirit that feeds from the flesh of a sacrifice. Having this exotic array of influences in mind, O Morto collected samples, field-recordings and electronic sounds that would eventually appear in the dense (and sometimes enigmatic) triptych piece “The forest, the people and the spirits”. Originally composed for 8 digital tracks in the sonic research studio of SFU Burnaby (Canada), the record explores the possibilities of sound manipulation as a way to create rich, vivid and cinematic soundscapes. A noise maker by nature, André also plays in the excellent Älforjs and produces some of the most addictive beats as Notwan." —António M. Silva
Core Mantle Crust (2015) is an 8 channel soundscape composition, built only by field recordings, mainly recordings of a rail in a staircase at SFU Burnaby, which set the mood of the whole piece. Main techniques used were granular synthesis and convolution, from software built by myself especially for 8 channel spatialization.
One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in [recording] is its close association with death... The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the [sound], its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living [listeners].’
—Walter J. Ong
Memento Mori (2012)is a cassette specific composition that explores death through the disembodiment caused by the recording media, ‘schizophonia’.
The piece is itself a memento mori of the cassette tape as a medium and at the same time of its own content, which was mutilated and molded and which may still be replaced by a new recording which will mark its death like an epitaph.
The piece is a cycle in between the two sections of a trip from Above Air to Below Ground: on the first part, Above Air, there is a crescendo from the earth into an aerial state of trance and then down to the limbo between human and divine, with the sound of the Muslim call to the sacred rituals. The second part, Below Ground, begins with a crescendo that gets broken suddenly to give way to an immersive and chaotic mass of noise, an underworld that gets also broken into a cold silent tension of squeaking saxophones that resemble moribund creatures, and then a crescendo of frenzy builds up again as a runaway from death and is again suddenly killed with silence.
"Albeit his music is now closer to a soundscape composition approach, O Morto (aka Mestre André) actually started as a free improv / noise project in 2012. However, after releasing his debut “Memento Mori”, O Morto slowly began to drift away from the harshest soundscapes to seek for a new direction. He found it under the form of the polyphonic music played by Ba’Aka (a pygmy tribe that still lives in the Republic of Congo), and in a conceptualised image of Jengi - a forest spirit that feeds from the flesh of a sacrifice. Having this exotic array of influences in mind, O Morto collected samples, field-recordings and electronic sounds that would eventually appear in the dense (and sometimes enigmatic) triptych piece “The forest, the people and the spirits”. 
One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in [recording] is its close association with death... The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the [sound], its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living [listeners].’