"O Porto", what to say about such an album, full of surprises, new music and a completely new rediscovery of Madredeus? Madredeus has changed and I feel that only "O Porto" can make us understand the new direction, the new aura spreading from the new notes, ideas and chords of Madredeus. "O Paraíso" has been a choc for all of Madredeus fans.
Now that I have listened so much to "O Porto", now that the notes of "Coisas Pequenas" in its live version wake me up every morning (making the worst moment of the day the most intense), now that I have been in that theatre, reconstructing my presence there with every note listened, I can say that I didn't understood the peculiarity of that new way of Madredeus. I had misunderstood "O Paraíso", watching it with the eyes of "O Espírito da Paz", of "Ainda" and of all the previous albums. I listened to it. That is the key: I only listened to it and Madredeus, as I always said, is not only music. It is a complex phenomenon made up of different arts and based on all the different feelings seen and felt by our heart. From the "mere" music of "O Paraíso", nothing more than music appeared, and I needed more to judge, to evaluate correctly. "O Porto" contains the music of "O Paraíso" in its living shape. That music acquires life from the screams of the people in the theatre, from the voices of the musicians, from the gentle and mysterious sound of the walking of the musicians on the wooden stage. Acquires life from its temporary existence in time and space. While "O Paraíso" seem something like a testament from a past civilization, "O Porto" is living, together with its music, in its peculiarity in time, in its ability to recreate a precise moment which is passed and is now lost like a dead person, a loved one. But please remember that only a living being can be dead. The music is for this reason much more spontaneous, lays in time like a monologue, a dialogue, flexible and movable. The songs get life from the hint of improvisation hidden in the executions, from the choices made for that particular stage. Now, the music of "O Paraíso" is on this Earth. O Porto has been one of the biggest experiences of my life. It is warm, incredibly thick and tearful. It is serene, just as the smile of your home when you return from work. Serene as the smile of your wife, of your woman, greeting you in the house where you live after a day of Hate and Redemption. It is dense as the feelings of a whole life. It crosses the ways of the heart in their entirety. It is simply beautiful and also seducing with its morbid and soft tone of guitars and voice.
Voice which can enrapture your thought in a web of ideas, pure ideas, where age and time doesn't exist, and your life endures the time of a song, a birth in every beginning, a death in every ending..... 18 songs, 18 lives, different and equal in their origin, in their feeling's matrix.
It is calm as a narration of an old grandmother but also intense as the real development of actions; calm as a memory, intense as the passing of the present from the future to the past. I listen to it and the stage appear in front of me. Teresa is singing, I perceive her movements. The voice seems a incense cloud over the audience, sustained by their breath, by their living. Like a fog, it enters all the narrows passages of the theatre, and the music is the wind pushing it along. I imagine myself in the corridors of the theatre, while the voice of Teresa, distant in the reverberation of the walls, appear even more present, because it seems that the walls, the lamps, the floor is singing too. The voice is everywhere, completely detached from the body, from the physical existance. And I feel that also my body is singing in the soft massage that the waves of sound makes on it. I feel like a piece of soft clay, modeled by that sound, in a shape that I adore, because is much more similar to my real being. I imagine myself to be invisible, walking silently on the stage, watching, undisturbed, the intense faces of the musicians, watching their hands producing with short movements contractions and expansions of my heart. I walk towards Teresa. I am in front of her. Lost in her voice, I looked at her, at her hands moving in an hypnotic pattern, shaping the air as sculptures of words. During "A Margem" she sits and I can sit near her, and the song becomes a simple dialogue between us. Then, in a dream, I watched the audience, listening, and I discover my face in every face I see. Teresa's dancing is a manifestation of joy. It's the complete fusion of a body in the music surrounding her. When she dance, her voice seems to continue spreading from her dresses, from her smile, from the rhytmic movements of her arms. Nothing can express so well the joyful and earthly feeling of that song. The music, which is the same accompanying the voice, appears completely different when the body of Teresa is singing through the dance. It seems different because it seems that it is trying to describe what is happening on the stage. Every note is a word of that description, accurate, precise, vague, vain. Teresa dances and her well being makes the space around her a sustainment to her movements, which appear soft, liquid, a hot liquid chocolate: sweet and warm. Drink it up.
Corvinus
from the site Madredeus - O Porto - http://go.to/madredeus