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Burnt Friedman & João Pais Filipe

A meaningful and fortunate meeting between drummer and percussionist João Pais Filipe and electronic wizard Burn Friedman, whose collaborative process started in 2018 and, this year, saw the release of the first volume of Automatic Writing, subtitled Mechanics of Waving, through Friedman's Nonplace, following one side of the Eurydike 12” with the great late Jaki Liebzeit on the other. With the release title alluding to a process the musicians call themselves “automatic music”, Mechanics of Waving is the result of four years of thorough study around the mechanics and possibilities of rhythm and percussion, sublimated into an hypnotic and cycling flow of (false) repetition, where timbre, harmony and rhythm entangle themselves between polyrhythms, almost-tactile textures and hazy echoes derived from dub. A continuum with all the work Friedmann's been developing for the past four decades, with such revered projects as Drome, Nonplace Urban Field or Flanger – with Atom Heart – propelling a cross-pollination between jazz, dub and various schools of electronics that, more recently, channelled into his Secret Rhythms incarnation – a self-explanatory alias for this musician's almost obsessive fascination. An interest shared with Pais Filipe, a musician based in Porto whose prolific activity has been creating a deeply personal pan-global vision towards the shapes and possible escapes of rhythm, both solo and in projects like CZN or HHY & The Macumbas. Everything in its right place.