53 Diamonds by Tetine

We are happy to announce the release of Tetine’s spoken word album 53 DIAMONDS on Wet Dance Recordings. Composed, recorded and produced by Bruno Verner & Eliete Mejorado – and initially presented as a sound installation in São Paulo at Galeria Jaqueline Martins’ Glory Hole space curated by Bruno Mendonça - the record features a collection of electronic eerie sonic uncompressed landscapes and tales.

Comprised of 10 spacious, slow and atmospheric pieces for electronics, piano, fx and voices, these tracks can be listened both independently from each other or as an expanded narrative in the form of a soup opera. 53 DIAMONDS is a dark queer post-Marxist / post-internet fictional sonic critique on the vacuous world of art collectors, hegemonic cultural entrepreneurs, media moguls and other new colonialists. 

The album acidly satirizes a series of superficial neoliberal clichés by vocally dramatizing forms of mindless consumerism, competitive behaviour, betrayal, submission, domination, the colonization of ‘capitalistic dreams’ and private property. It works as a satire of the old white elite with their self-important men and women and their relationship with questions of self-indulgence, expectation, use-value/exchange-value and panic. 

On another note, the record investigates the economy of being ‘given a present’ and confronts it with narratives of buying & selling diamonds. These tracks are also 'cut-up tales' which fictionalise situations of abundance and were written by using cheap advertising late night TV selling-of-products language, eBay messages, internet crime stories and melodramatic interjections & talk as their source.

53 DIAMONDS is a hallucinatory collection of blind short stories, crimes and falso brilhantes. It explores ideas of 'boredom’, ‘property’, ‘selfishness’ and ‘freedom’ in our current contemporary cultural condition and the collective fictions it produces in the realm of a self-perpetuating technological regime of control. It plays with notions of compressed culture, power and powerlessness, repression, rejection, betrayal, sexualized children, nationalism, race, Brazil, Latin America and the death of myths.

Through the combination of modified voices, dystopian basslines, beat-less wet soundscapes and harmonic tensions, 53 Diamonds was written as a poetically caustic and sexually-charged commentary on contemporary superficiality and forms of controlled de-sublimation.

Tropical Mutant Punk Funk

Tetine are formed by Brazilian musicians/artists Bruno Verner & Eliete Mejorado.

The pair met in 1995 in Brazil while taking part in the local underground art post-punk scene of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, and since then, they have been producing a multitude of works & actions through the hybrid universes of performance art, music, video and poetry.