Contraplacado

In the penultimate scene of Recordações da Casa Amarela, João César Monteiro — playing his alter ego, João de Deus, leaving an asylum — turns to a fellow patient and says: "Se Deus nos der vida e saúde." If God grants us life and health. It is a conditional farewell: they will meet again in twenty years, if. The phrase is rooted in a popular Portuguese idiom: patience and contingency, the quiet acknowledgement that some things depend on conditions beyond our control. It is not a promise. It is a reckoning.

In 2019, the label invited me to contribute a reinterpretation of "Contraplacado," the closing track from Aires, the 2014 self-titled debut by Vitor Bruno Pereira, one of CCA's cofounders. I was only just finding my way back to music then. I tried, but nothing I made felt substantial. Eventually, I set it aside, though I never let it go entirely. It became one of those debts that sits with you — not exactly guilt, but an unresolved thing, a piece of unfinished business that resurfaces to remind you it is still waiting.

What eventually made it possible was not a decision but a condition. I had spent several months in a sustained collaborative process — writing regularly, responding to material exchanged back and forth, and maintaining a practice rhythm that gave the work momentum I hadn't felt in some time. When that process ended, I didn't want to lose what it had given me. The unresolved piece was still there, so I sat down with it properly for the first time.

The original is drenched in reverb and noise — a dense, textural piece that conceals as much as it reveals. What I heard beneath its surface suggested something filmic — not a remix, not a conventional reinterpretation, but something closer to a score for a film that didn't yet exist. That gave me a way in. My instinct was not to work with that surface but to dissolve it, to find what was atomic underneath. What emerged were two melodic ideas: one dominant, present throughout; the other introduced late, allowed to fade into silence before it fully resolves. I decided to separate them — not to develop them independently, as though they were unrelated, but to ask what each needed to become itself fully.

The first section took the longest to find. It moves through space — or that is how it feels to me: propulsive, abrasive, building towards something and then suddenly suspending, a single held note in the silence where everything had been — the residue of things that have ended and the precursor to things that haven't yet begun. I have spent twenty years making music that resists steady rhythm, preferring the random pulse and the granular fragment to anything that could be called a beat. This piece is the closest I have come to a regular rhythm in all that time. It still doesn't sit still — but it breathes more evenly than anything else I've made.

What follows moves through time. Where the first feels forward-looking and post-human, the second arrives somewhere older — weighted, acoustic, rooted in a tradition far older than any of the tools used to make the first half. I have never written for orchestra before, even in this form. What surprised me was how naturally the two worlds found each other, not as a contrast but as the same interior described in two different languages. The acoustic didn't replace the synthetic. It absorbed it.

The subtitle is a small act of fidelity — to the label, to Aires, and to the idea that some things take as long as they take. Se Deus nos der vida e saúde. If God grants us life and health.