Giovanni Di Domenico

Talking of spectacles, the Capela Imaculada do Seminário Menor played host to a performance by Italian pianist, Giovanni Di Domenico. Built in the 1940s as part of a catholic seminary, the recently renovated chapel is celebrated for the sublime acoustic experience afforded by its elongated concrete dome. In the lead-up to Di Domenico’s entrance, an ambience of hushed astonishment reverberates off the dome’s surface, one that dies down as Di Domenico takes to his piano stool, on one side armed with a grand piano and on the other, an electric piano embellished by a host of effect pedals.

What follows is enough for people to forget where they are at all. Suddenly, we’re suspended in time as Di Domenico’s melodies undulate, overlap, intertwine, disband, go astray, and come together again. The chapel is arranged so that both halves of the audience face one another. Those who keep their eyes open can’t help but meet with the open eyes of those opposite them. A series of secret, fleeting connections and ephemeral encounters take place over the course of an hour: small acts of resistance against our unspoken charge to capture, document and archive each moment in the digital age. In a time when our existences are characterised by information overload and sensory bombardment, Di Domenico’s performance is so minimal that it feels radical.

Shida Shahabi 

Shahabi, accompanied by a cellist and keyboardist, takes to the stage of the magnificent twentieth century revivalist Theatro Circo, framed by the auditorium’s neo-baroque gilded embellishments, a conspicuous-as-they-get chandelier, and ceiling fresco. Since the release of her debut full-length LP in 2018, Shahabi has forayed into the world of cinema. Tonight, the Stockholm-based composer will perform her most recent album Living Circle, a tapestry of emotion laid bare.

Shahabi’s music is human to its core. Throughout the show, we relive a lifetime of moments contrived by the performers’ instruments: non-specific longing, piano-induced stupor, the devastation of heart-wrenching cello bows. Pieces build to epic crescendos which teeter on the edge of resolution before plunging back into tumult; structures that, coupled with reverb-laden maximalism, evoke the post-rock of groups such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Ziúr

Semibreve’s nighttime programme happens at gnration – a cultural centre which takes its name from the building’s previous occupation by a paramilitary police wing – the Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR) – for whom it historically served as a headquarters. On Saturday night, Ziúr takes to stage for a DJ set that aptly captures the irreverence that’s baked into the venue’s reincarnation as a club space.

The proliferation of words such as ‘multigenre’, ‘high octane’ and perhaps especially ‘deconstructed’ have somewhat stripped them of all meaning. It’s appropriate, then, to discuss Ziúr’s set in stronger terms. Over the space of two hours, we’re catapulted into oblivion. Whilst the Berlin-based DJ and producer’s affiliation with mercurial record labels Planet Mu, PAN and Hakuna Kulala is evident in her thrilling combination of metallic, Gábor Lázár-esque disassembled club tracks mixed with Brazilian funk and dubstep, it’s more like watching a live performance than a DJ set. A headphoneless and highly-focused Ziúr plays the CDJ’s as if an instrument, looping and chopping tracks so that they’re barely identifiable. It’s apt that daylight saving means the clocks change half-way through her set – her rejection of traditional phrasing is a rejection of time itself. Contrary to the highly-cerebral shows we’d experienced across the course of the festival, Ziúr’s set centred around humour. Not only does she pick up the mic on multiple occasions to make jokes; she ends the set by speeding up jungle ad absurdum. 

Saint Abdullah, Eomac & Rebecca Salvadori

A Forbidden Distance is the brainchild of Iranian-Canadian duo Saint Abdullah, Irish producer, DJ and label owner Eomac and Italo-Australian video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori. It’s a specially-commissioned audiovisual project that explores the notions of borders and migration. As we pile into Theatro Circo for the weekend’s penultimate show, there’s a sense of eager anticipation, perhaps prompted by the panel that one half of Saint Abdullah – Mohammad Mehrabani-Yeganeh – had spoken on earlier in the week. Mehrabani-Yeganeh described how discovering his musicality helped him reconnect to his body after his family’s migration from Iran to Canada threw everything into question – even a connection so innate as his own corporeality. As do these meditations, A Forbidden Distance finds its impact in its intimacy. 

The intimacy is multifaceted. Its most obvious manifestation is Salvadori’s video, which compiles the tapes that Mehrabani-Yeganeh’s mother would shoot in their Canadian family home and send to relatives in Iran. During the performance, Mehrabani-Yeganeh uses a sampler to extract the sound of his sister learning to play the flute, or his brother Mehdi (who we are informed couldn’t perform due to personal matters) issuing a defiant declaration that he’s tried living in the West, but thinks he belongs in the East. The piece’s substantial intimacy is compounded by its delivery. As Eomac’s soundtrack shapeshifts between abrasive club mutations, grime-indebted beats and gentler melodic refrains, the three artists exchange looks, taking visual cues from one another as their respective mediums drift in and out of sync. The proximity we’re granted to the subject matter makes it hard to resist the entitlement of understanding each part of it: whose words overlay the image? How much of the performance is improvised? Of course, we have no such right. As the name suggests, we’re kept at an appropriate distance.

Moritz von Oswald

As Semibreve 2024 neared curtains close, there was one more act – and one more church – left for our enjoyment. Germany’s pioneering producer, multi-instrumentalist and composer Moritz von Oswald demonstrated his chameleonic ways in a live rendition of his 2023 Tresor album Silencio to pews full of starstruck attendees in the Basílica dos Congregados. He is positioned at the church’s chancel with a hefty-sized mixing desk and some acoustic percussive instruments, behind a 16-piece soprano-alto choir who, along with the choir’s tenor-bass contingent performing from the room’s edges, respond to the instruction of a conductor. The choir is local to Braga and, as I’m later informed, has had little more than four hours to rehearse the piece, making its delivery all the more impressive. 

The occult sound palette contrived by von Oswald’s synthesisers is dynamised by the theatrics of a vocal chorus to produce something at once sublimely beautiful and eerily uncanny. Staccato vocal refrains assimilate within the soundtrack’s percussion. They’re manipulated in real time, submerged in echo and reverb. In an aptly melodramatic manifestation of the sound’s material quality, the church’s sacred effigies tremble as they’re overtaken by the low frequencies. It’s joyous to see von Oswald take in the choir together with us. Whilst  – as you might expect – his stage presence is incredibly understated, he occasionally lifts his gaze to smile gently in their direction. After a remarkably poignant performance, it’s not over for some until they’ve snagged a surreptitious photograph of von Oswald’s set-up. It’s a rare moment for analogue aficionados to gawp at the crown jewels of their de facto overlord.