Canto

CANTO (arranged by the musicians named below)

Sound poems based on the Canto General by Pablo Neruda

Lucia Pulido (Voice, Cuatro)

Angélica Castelló (Paetzold-flute, voice, electronics, idea, concept)

Christian Fennesz (Guitar, electronics)

Miguel Angel Gaspar (Physical Theater);

Martin Siewert (Lap- & Pedal Steel, guitar, electronics)

Burkhard Stangl (Guitar, electronics, concept)

 

Reading musical movements from the universe of Pablo Neruda’s poems, striking up the great song “CANTO GENERAL”, as the opus magnum of the Chilenian poet is called: with “Canto”, singer and electronic musician Angélica Castelló from Neruda’s country of exile Mexico, guitarists and electronic musicians Burkhard Stangl, Martin Siewert and Christian Fennesz from Austria, and the Colombian singer and cuatro player Lucia Pulido create a sound poem of broad electro-acoustic tracks and intimate sound passages. The group got together at the recording of two “cantos” for Gustav Deutsch’s recent work “FILM IST. a girl & a gun” and now draws back on the songs of love and lamentation of various Latin American musicians like Violeta Parra, Silvio Rodriguez, and Victor Jara, unfolds them to a transnational language of music which gathers political and poetic messages of the both cosmopolitan and home-loving writer Neruda. Again and again, movements emerging out of nowhere are reshaping the sounds. For Angélica Castelló, dance in “Canto” is “the soul of hope” expressing what can’t be said with either words or music. The musicians sing of the acts of creation, of natural wonders, myths, cruelties, and glimmers of hope from the verses by the Nobel Prize laureate and undaunted fighter against fascism. Love, revolution and the magic, which is ever-present in Latin America, define the flow of sound and word poems.
Canto is a “poème éléctronique for the Revolution.