SEMIÓTICAS by Ilda Teresa Castro & Vítor Rua

This record emerges from a shared field of attention.
It is the sonic residue of an encounter between sound and image, between human gesture and algorithmic life. A collaboration shaped by listening as much as by playing. Alongside the visual artists André Quaresma and Rita Barqueiro, and with Ilda Teresa Castro, I entered a space where music does not accompany images, nor do images illustrate sound. They grow together, like parallel organisms learning each other’s rhythms.
The guitar — a Steinberger — is fragmented and reassembled through granular processes. Cosmos, Mood, Tensor and Hologram stretch time, dissolve attacks, suspend decay. Two granular synthesizers, Tempera and Torso S-4, act as shifting terrains rather than instruments: unstable, breathing, constantly reconfiguring the present.
Ilda Teresa Castro brings another body into the system. The theremin traces invisible lines in the air. The Roland synthesizer hums with geological patience. A digital piano, folded into the long reverberant memory of the Mood pedal, becomes less percussive, more atmospheric — a resonance rather than a strike.
Across ten movements, the music oscillates between ambient stillness and nocturnal density. Minimalist repetition slowly mutates into electronic drift. Nothing arrives suddenly; nothing leaves completely. These are not tracks so much as passages — ten phases of an immersive soundscape, ten slow turns of a single environment.
What you hear is shaped by the presence of generative visuals — musographic systems, algorithmic drawings that evolve like artificial life. Though unseen on this recording, their influence remains. The music learned to respond, to wait, to follow micro-variations, to trust emergence over control.
This is music as habitat.
Sound as landscape.
Time as a material that can be stretched, folded, and inhabited.
Listen as one listens to weather.
Or to light moving across a wall at night.

Vítor Rua is one of the key figures of Portuguese creative music, with a career that covers a multitude of idioms and styles - from rock through minimalism, folk, punk, thrash metal, electronic and country music to free improvisation. In the other world, since 1987, he has focused more on classical contemporary composition, writing for soloists, chamber groups and orchestras. He has seven operas

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