Dada Garbeck - The Ever Coming - Cosmophonia (2021)

Cosmophonia opens with “Waltz for an Empty Space“, which arrives with a spring breeze of jazzy aromas. The melody, embodied in the saxophone by João Mortágua and the trumpet by Ricardo Formoso, braids the harmony with spatial notes of the synthesizers. The single conveys happiness and knows how to receive us, painting us a first musical portrait of what we will hear later, but it is modest to represent Dada Garbeck's ambition.

We are facing the third part of an album tetralogy, The Ever Coming, an elaborate sound and repetition operation that intends to take the listener on an inner journey. Each launch makes use of a different instrument to guide you. In Cosmophonia, it is the murmurs, who both assume themselves as the lead (“My Dog is an Alien”) and dialogue with the voices (“Dead Detuned”). The melody passes between them over the groove, the trot of the drums by Pedro Gonçalves Oliveira, which accompanies the balance of the mind giving balance to the body. With these elements, plus his synthesizers, Rui Souza composes pieces that are both developed over time and petrified in him. Sometimes, its duration does not allow long-term hypnosis, but it leaves the door ajar for meditation.

"Time does not exist", declares us in "Waltz for an Empty Space". It is with this sensation of circularity, where music both advances and retains in a tidal movement, that Dada Garbeck's references and intuitions foam. In “Labrador do Minho”, the center of the stage is a field recording by a farmer. This ethnographic moment reminds us of what Rui Souza had already confessed to us before: “the greatest wealth we still have are these oral traditions.”

In addition to being a musical and spiritual instrument, the voices form the lyrical bridge with the explored universe. In “Alien Assembly”, at the end of a free episode by João Mortágua and Ricardo Formoso, a passage of spoken word breaks out, syncopated with the rhythm: “unbearable to acknowledge our existence to be a gift we fail to be, we fail to see ”. The Ever Coming asks us to be available, through music, to listen to others, which echo in our heads and wake up in our senses. “The rest is conversation and the conversations, although very important, are carried away by the wind,” Rui told us, the rest being anything that does not involve love, pleasure and art.

“Washam pt2” is a sweet ending, gently inviting the audience to leave the loop. It is possible to listen to Cosmophonia as an album, based on the plastic combination of woodwinds, voices and synthesizers, or as a mantra. In both cases, the listeners are at the end of the trip. The other percussive points us to the next stop, the fourth volume of the Dada Garbeck saga.