HOMO / Hysterical One Man Orchestra
The work of Filipe Silva (HOMO) is informed by the idea of the construction of personal realities and cosmologies, as advanced by visionaries such as Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Jorge Luis Borges and Sun Ra. He also investigates the use of extreme repetition and other techniques for altered perception in the context of archaic and traditional musics.
With Jonathan Saldanha, he runs the label/collective SOOPA, taking part in most of its affiliated projects; he also collaborates with Eugene Chadbourne, Damo Suzuki (Can), Steve Mackay (The Stooges), among many others.
HOMO/HystericalOneManOrchestra is his solo project, in which he explores the concept of solitude as a performative condition, making frequent use of the acoustic phenomenon of feedback both as a sonic element and as a manifestation of cyclical cause-and-effect events.
HOMO’s performances are based on the relation between bodily gesture and the production of sound, lying at the intersection of base acoustic principles, shamanic evocation and illusionism.
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I Have Played The Same Acoustic Guitar for 21 Years
I have played the same acoustic guitar for 21 years.
It was given to me by my mother in Easter, 1989, since I had been a good boy and had had good grades, and since she didn’t know I was obsessed with sex (or did she, considering I was 13?) and the alteration of perception (I knew about Syd Barrett but not yet about Burroughs or shamans), sniffing glue on occasion and smoking incense cones, since I was too young and inexperienced to actually find myself some proper dope.
This guitar has patiently adjusted to my changing whims: it has been electrified, first in private by my father’s stethoscope, and then publicly by the contact mics of History; it has become acoustic once again, has been used as percussion (pre- and post-discovery of Giacinto Scelsi), as a resonator and as a vocal chamber. I wrote a piece for my newborn daughter on it.
It has three strings in present times, just about as many as necessary.
It can be argued that objects are just objects and that instruments are just instruments; this is true, just as humans are just humans and gods are just gods. But we also cannot deny the transfer of anima that occurs over two decades of sustained physical and mental contact between the inconstant flow of human intentions and the slow decay of wood and metal.
In August 2009, a little over 20 years after I first played it as a kid already sensing infinity within his pubescent skull, I recorded guitar tracks for Jonathan Uliel Saldanha’s “The Earth As A Floating Egg” album on my acoustic guitar.
Every now and then, your mind/body/psyche manage to bridge the great chasm of Things and events fall into their place in the Cycle.
One man’s schizophrenia is another man’s sense of timing.
November 2010
Filipe Silva / HOMO
