Upcoming activities:
The End is near!
Final show of the alphabetically ordered tour of Portugal's district capitals! Sometime during July.
The unthinkable has happened. After a year and a half of monthly concerts throughout the country, F.R.I.C.S. finish their spider's web trail through Portugal's geopolitical alphabet with a show that, just like the Apocalypse, will happen for sure, but on an unknown date. The month, however, will be July, and the center of the blast will be Viseu, Portugal's most distant district from the letter A. Stay tuned for more info on date, guests, plans, etc! And after this majestic voyage, others will follow! That's a promise!
More F.R.I.C.S. here.
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One Man Nation & ps at Casa Viva, Porto, July 3.
One Man Nation is the nom de guerre of SIngaporean Marc Chia, who is currently based in Holland. His work explores the harsher areas of electronica and beat-driven music, with evocative sampling and a deep narrative feeling of geopolitical disenchantment ingrained into his dark textures; One Man Nation has released on labels such as Ad Noiseam and Syrphe.
Opening the night will be ps, a.k.a Filipe Cruz, portuguese musician and head of netlabel Enough Records, offering a tapestry of glitches and glow-in-the-dark sonics.
More One Man Nation here. More ps here, and Enough Records here.
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Recent activities:
F.R.I.C.S. at Associação Espontânea, Vila Real, June 21.
On the day after the Pontevedra show, F.R.I.C.S. travelled back to Portugal to Vila Real, for the second-to-last stop of their alphabetically ordered tour of Portugal's district capitals. A fortuitious and inspiring combination of powerful wine, sweltering heat, mental channeling and astral conjunctions lead to one of the tour's strongest concerts, beginning with nearly 10 minutes of a maraca-lead voodoo attack, and progressing into deep psychedelic funkscapes. The arrival of the police prompted an encore in the form of a two-second Napalm Death cover version. 17 stops on the tour out of 18, and the end is near, as this devastating concert proved!
More F.R.I.C.S. here.
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F.R.I.C.S. in the old town of Pontevedra, June 20.
After their nymph-powered triumph in Ourense last September (see the archive for more), F.R.I.C.S. returned to the magical lands of Galiza in northwestern Spain for another street gig, this time in a celebration of the rehabilitation of the old town of Pontevedra. A long, exhausting night reached its peak at dawn, in a small tavern where the middle-aged owners picked up F.R.I.C.S.'s portable percussions and joined the flow.
More F.R.I.C.S. here.
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Mental Liberation Ensemble at Casa Viva, Porto, June 15.
Spurred by the cataclismic, astronomic and seismic event of legendary nomad musician and Midwestern shaman Scott Nydegger's return to Porto, the elusive Mental Liberation Ensemble reconvened for the second time in their four-year history, to throw offerings of blossoming virginal soundforms into the gaping volcano of the Cosmic Ear.
Mental Liberation Ensemble were:
Jonathan hhy Cohen - shenai, melodica, shakers, euphonium; Filipe de Banshee Mendes - mutant synth, shakers, chime; Mats Gustavo - drums, tuned metal; Álvaro Jourgensen - trumpet, flugel horn, conch, percussion; Henrique Mitslaff - electric double bass; André Jolivet - electronics, percussion; João Zorn - tuned plastic, tuned metal; Scott The Comet Nigger - voices.
Stay tuned for a video of the concert coming up soon!
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F.R.I.C.S.- Mobile at Festival Serralves em Festa, Porto, June 7.
The opening morning of Porto's celebrated festival Serralves em Festa presented a vital double astrological conjunction, 316 years after the earthquake that destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, the world's pirate capital, and 50 years after the glorious day that brought The Artist Known As Prince into our world. F.R.I.C.S., at the festival's invitation, performed a procession on wheels that sought to harness energy from both of the events and to redirect it through the use of specially-made sun-tuning hats. All in all, a pleasant Saturday morning, with an open bus, a P.A. system and a pirate flag adding to the mood.
More F.R.I.C.S. on Myspace; click here. More about Serralves em Festa here.
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Mécanosphère at Festival Ó da Guarda, June 6.
Mécanosphère took their itenerant séance to the heights of Guarda, on Portugal's highest mountain range, for a concert included in the long-running Ó da Guarda festival. Mécanosphère's brutalist meta-funk-dub was complemented by verbal cut-ups from The Great Book of Saint Cyprian, an ancient portuguese, spanish and arabic book of spells and exorcisms, and by a screening of Kenneth Anger's classic film, "Lucifer Rising".
More Mécanosphère on Myspace. More on The Great Book of Saint Cyprian here. More on Kenneth Anger's "Lucifer Rising" here.
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F.R.I.C.S. at Nasoni, Viana do Castelo, May 31.
F.R.I.C.S began the "V" section (the final one!) of their alphabetically ordered tour of Portugal's district capitals with a concert in Viana's beautiful venue, Nasoni. In fact, there were two concerts: one on May 31, before midnight, as part of the tour, and another one after midnight, therefore already on June 1, which celebrated the International Children's day, and was especially dedicated to Maria, daughter of F.R.I.C.S.'s Sr. Martins and the first member of the next F.R.I.C.S. generation.
more F.R.I.C.S. on Myspace. More pictures from F.R.I.C.S. on Flickr.
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Faca Monstro Boom 'n' Bass Party, JUP, Porto, May 30.
Faca Monstro, the newly formed alliance of Porto-based twisted beatmakers, brought mayhem to the dancefloor at JUP with a three-pronged attack. First up, Ex-Pawn blasted some high-energy Jedi power with his majestic tracks; then, the Soopa/Marvellous Tone trio Çuta Kebab & Party spread joy and madness with their progressive mid-eastern breaks; to round it all off, DJPedro played a four-hour set of high-energy boom sound. The smell of sweat lasted well into the morning. Stay tuned as the Faca Monstro phenomenon grows and grows!
More Faca Monstro at Myspace.
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F.R.I.C.S. marching on at Mercado do Bolhão, Porto, May 10.
As the struggle against the transformation of Porto's Bolhão market into a privately-run, sophisticated crypto-shopping-mall continued, F.R.I.C.S. were once again invited to provide the soundtrack for a gathering and protest outside the market, which they did with pleasure and pride.
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Random future plans:
Ghostbusting in Madagascar:
Jonathan hhy Scumclash & Benjamin Brejon, the island of Madagascar, sometime during the summer.
hhy and BB, partners in projects like Mécanosphère and Beast Box, will walk among the ruins of Libertalia, the proto-anarchist XVII century pirate republic, step on dinosaur bones, run from fluorescent lemurs and record with local musicians on the one and only island of Madagascar, where Africa meets Southeast Asia and where dead ancestors meet their relatives upon demand. Stay tuned for more info on this musical-spiritual pilgrimage.
More hhy here and more Mécanosphère here.
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Also, stay tuned for more concert dates for F.R.I.C.S. and Jugalbandi to be announced soon.
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Upcoming releases:
“A Perfect Observer In Random Wounds”
by: Most People Have Been Trained To Be Bored
Format: 7'' vinyl
Release date: May
We are happy to announce our first vinyl release, a 7'' of post-contemporary mutant electronic marimba music by Most People..., a.k.a. Gustavo Costa, composer, death metal drummer, and member of F.R.I.C.S. and Mécanosphère. The record will be available soon from this website.
 Gustavo Costa, aka Most People Have Been Trained To Be Bored.
More info on Most People... here.
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“Kix-Shake #2”
by: various artists
Format: CD-R
Release date: May
Final touches are being added to the second volume of this compilation covering breaks, dub and other beat-oriented and beat-disoriented musics (the first volume was released in 2006), co-released by Soopa and Marvellous Tone. A release party will happen in May, on a date to be announced, while in the next months a vinyl version, including remixes, will be made available.
Marvellous Tone here.
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“Live At Adolf666”
by: Marcelo Aguirre & John Hegre & Die Polizei
Format: CD-R
Release date: June
A live meeting between Marcelo Aguirre (Abominations, Pregnant Testicle, etc) on drums, John Hegre (Jazzkammer) on guitar and the Berlin Police on impeccable timing. Possibly the beginning of further collaborations with Marcelo, with whom we share an interest in matters such as penis panic, animalistic viking warriors and the like. File this CD under brutal improvisation, free-death or mental-metal, as you prefer!
More on Marcello Aguirre here and John Hegre here.
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Other Soopa-related news and releases:
Badawi vs hhyScumclash, dub ride on ROIR!
Jonathan hhy Scumclash is one of the featured artists on "Unit Of Resistance", a CD of alchemical remixes of the great dub magician Raz Mesinai (a.k.a. Badawi). Raz has put out albums on labels such as Tzadik or Asphodel; "Unit Of Resistance" is released by ROIR, the legendary dub (and not just dub) label that did records by bands such as Bad Brains and Suicide. Besides hhyscumclash, other participants in this collection of mixes/remixes of original material, recorded by Raz and heavyweight musicians like Jim Black, include Marina Rosenfeld, Kode9 and DJ Spooky. Good sonics to be around!
Some further info on "Unit Of Resistance":
'"Unit Of Resistance" is a collaboration between a handful of NYC musicians (laying down tracks of protest in 2004) and a selection of international musicians interpreting these tracks two years later. (...) Raz set up a sophisticated web of information via the internet to allow the mixers access to prima material and to do with it as they wished. The result is conspiratorial music raising a lone flag or perhaps many different flags being raised jointly.'
-info taken from www.CDBaby.com
more info at: ROIR
more on Scumclash: hhy
You can listen to the Badawi vs hhy track on WFMU: wfmu.org
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“Dystopic Futures” CD!
Curated by our dear Henrique Gameboy, “Dystopic Futures” is a compilation of futuristically inclined music (in a loose sense), that features tracks by shadowy alchemist hhyscumclash, Most People Have Been Trained To Be Bored, and various Soopa collaborators and members of F.R.I.C.S. such as OCP and João Martins.
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"F.R.I.C.S. - Expostos", pictures from the exhibition!
The legendary exhibition "F.R.I.C.S. - Expostos", which took place in September and October in the University of Ourense, in Spain, yielded beautiful photos of F.R.I.C.S.'s multimedia altar, created especially for the occasion. View more photos at http://flickr.com/photos/joaomartins/
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Radio Worm - Dig Feed Shit, "Smoke Signals From Portugal"
In 2005, Soopa was invited by the dutch Worm organisation to curate an edition of their radio show, whose theme would be current portuguese musical projects. The result, "Smoke Signals From Portugal", was broadcast in October 2005 as #68 in the monthly Radio Worm show, and features projects like The A.S.S., Herzbeat Hotel, hhy, Most People Have Been Trained to Be Bored, Mécanosphère and @C.
A very few copies are available from soopa@soopa.org, while the original broadcast can be accessed on www.wormstation.nl (click on "Radio", then on "Radio Worm", and then on number 68).
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