Brasilia Laptop Orchestra-10 yEars aLive; Public Eyesore Records #150, 2022

 

Ten years is a pretty long spell in which to do anything, and as such seems deserving of some kind of acknowledgement. So it has been done for Brasilia Laptop Orchestra by way of Public Eyesore's release of 10 yEars aLive, a compilation of tracks culled from the years 2013-2021( if you're reading this in the year 2022, don't worry, their first performance was in 2012).

Across eleven tracks of what can be lazily called Electronic Music, BSBLOrk as they call themselves, journey into varied zones of sound. These sounds, and the parameters in which they are generated, are subject to initiatory sources such as large dice being thrown, cameras as input/control devices, and audience participation. These sources fuel the primary concerns of BSBLOrk's aesthetic: physicality, play, and political engagement. The sense that Disaster Amnesiac gets is that the ensemble are concerned with not evolving into a dry exercise in academic music, but instead of morphing into a more living entity. Another sense that I get is that it's important to see this group, for the listener to inhabit the same space in which they are producing their music. Not existing within a vacuum would serve to prop up all three of their stated goals, that's for sure.

Back to the sounds. They are varied and wide-ranging, I'd imagine in large part due to the non-fixed nature of the personnel. On yEars, I have heard DNA sequences floating within the ethers of protoplasm, primitive 1960's synthesizer blooping and bleeping, disembodied voices howling up and down from their respective spatial coordinates, Cosey Fanni Tutti's pocket trumpet, Bryan Day's junkyard gamelan, fizzing squalls of dying circuitry, spaceship docking instructions, crazed beings preaching their cosmologies, etc. etc. Returning to that idea of having a morphology, BSBLOrk certainly does seem to have that characteristic, at least for this listener. The music that is documented on yEars is juicy and breathing, nowhere staid. I imagine that this is the desired effect, so kudos to Brasilia Laptop Orchestra for their achievement. 

What do you think music production will be like in 2032? Disaster Amnesiac imagines that most of the members of Brasilia Laptop Orchestra have pondered that question. Until that time, I'll try to figure out how to say "cool set dude" in Portuguese as I (hopefully) see them play via some streaming platform. I'm glad to have a copy of 10 yEars aLive to jam in the interim.