Boa Tarde by Julien Desprez | Luís Lopes

French and Portuguese guitarists Julien Desprez and Luís Lopes manage to surpass the usual divider when electric guitars are the main tools of experimentation: either you explore the specific guitar / effect pedal sounds or use the instrument and its gadgets as electronic non-recognizable interfaces. They do both things, playing electronic music with an organic feeling. Both of them have creative jazz, alternative rock and free improvised music as common backgrounds, but what they usually do on their separate paths go beyond those categories. Desprez is a performative artist with sound as focus, but engaging the entire body on what he does, through the development of feet techniques derived from tap dance, in order to connect and disconnect his processing pedals in new ways. Lopes practices a very clinical form of noise music, preferring a methodic use of feedback lines to the sonic blasts of the computer-driven acts. Sooner or later they would have to meet, and here is the consequence of that meeting of free spirits. “Boa Tarde”, the title of the album, is the Portuguese expression for “good afternoon”, but it’s a joke: the afternoon they tell us about isn’t very pleasant. It may be contemplative, but containing a kind of existential anguish. Highly recommended.

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