O
Paraiso
Dear O Paraiso,
it is difficult to describe you, dear musical interlocutor of so many evenings, mornings, of so many moments that will be forever bonded to your music, to your atmosphere, to your essence. I have never had a fixed idea that allowed me to gather the ideas that I made on you in an organum which could deserve a paper transcription. In the same way, but differently from what happened to me for Ainda, my notes are loose, my reflections are muddled, illogical, caused by the moment, by the state of mind and not by a serene and sure rational analysis. But I am forced now to put an order in the chaos of you breathe.
I listened you for the
first time with enthusiasm and without any kind of prejudice. I
liked you in a devastating way since the beginning, with that
song which is so deeply Madredeus and that tore from me tears at
the first listening. The sound was different, I was aware of
that, but I didn't care so much.
You sang in a different
way, the atmosphere that you created with your musical sculptures
in my room had a strange flavour that I didn't rationalize
sufficiently.
In different periods,
your image in me undergone several changes and distorsions caused
by quick judgments or by collateral passions for other collegue
of you like O Espirito da Paz. Now that O Porto has born from
Time and Art, your essence is much more understandable to me.
You come from a stormy period. Madredeus, in the
years of 1996 and 1997, undergone a deep transformation, already
started with the joining of Josè Peixoto, which altered so much,
in my opinion, the musical equilibrium inside the group (it has
been undoubtedly an incredible evolution...).
This process of disruption
of something which appeared undestructible and solid in its
ethereity, a human construction without any defect and able to
reproduce the musical perfection of a musical contradiction, went
on in silence. The ancient creature changed skin, mantaining her
soul intact, keeping its wills for the future, its dreams and its
determination. In a few months, all the fans feared the worst:
the tower of Pisa, wonder of an architectural contradiction,
seemed to break in its basis. But the Dream sustained her and
even now is sustaining her, because the Dream is the soul of
Paradise.
For this reason, after two
years of fear, a new fantastic creature, a new caravel started
its voyage from Lisboa, and its name was O Paraiso. An impossible
name, another contradiction in terms for what should have been
the Inferno: the inferno of transformation, of death and rebirth.
Yes, dear Paraiso, you are indiscribable. I could describe the miriad of different feelings that you evoked in me reflecting in my heart the best part of that myself that I can't see and understand. But I think that it would be better to analyze you with the instict of a surgeon to understand the biological basis of my syndrome, before retiring in the contemplation of its metaphysical meaning.
Even
for you, as for Ainda, it is impossible to find a initiation path
of any kind. You are not a road, you are an enourmous square
which looks at the sea, at the sky, at the city and at the people
who walk on it. As in every square there are many palaces which
are spectators to the human stories that goes on in front of
them, but if Ainda was that palaces, you, O Paraiso, are in the
stories of that people, in their soul, in the contorsions caused
in them by their feelings.
You are a collection of
human events, like a Recherche du Temps Perdu of proustian
memory, where the landscapes are made of feelings, of words and
of looks and not of natural manifestations. I can read in you all
the contrasting feelings that we can live in a common day and
listening to you, I can read my life, the interior one, the
hidden one, that you unveil to us without that embarrassment of
feeling sensations.
And the feeling which is
best described is that of love, undoubtedly bonded to the dear
one of saudade. In O Espirito da Paz, the feeling in its most
intimate reflection has been studied, in its consequences inside
us, as if love, afterall, was much more a feeling toward
ourselves than toward others. Now love, feeling, has get
concrete. Its real development, its idiosyncrasies, its birth,
its end is examined, but the resulting vision of love is sad and
full of nostalgic saudade. This sadness seems to derive from the
inevitable dichotomy between the illusion of a platonic love and
the reality of a love made of compromises, vain hopes and
renunciations.
You
talk often about the perfect love, as something that has been
lost, and that is perfect because it has been lost, because it is
distant, because it is impossible.
This is the cause of the
flee toward the Dream, peaceful and reassuring secret casket,
where we can soothe the pains of a reality which is malignant as
a Leopardi's Nature. From here, the frequent use of oneiric and
ipnotic images that we can found in your songs.
The Dream remains a private
and secret alcove; publicly, the disappointed love can be
poured on that abstract reflections for the pains of humanity
that we can found in O Fim da Estrada or in Cancao aos Novos and
that I think should be seen as fleeing ways for a thought that do
not want to remain on the near present.
A characterizing element
of you is though the particular atmosphere that you are able to
create, whose tone is so unique to be difficultly describable as
a palette of expressions and feelings.
I think though that one of
the dominant colours of that palette is that of anxiety. In many
of your 14 songs it appears in several ways. The atmosphere can
also be serene but it remains always tense, intense, like a
retained scream. Sometime that feeling shows itself in the
arrangment which is softly ipnotical and sometimes nearly
obsessive, while in others the accompaniment seems to pursue
anxiously the voice. I think about Cancao aos Novos, in which the
guitar seems to pursue the voice of Teresa which remains too high
to be reached. But the sound of that guitar in a so low tone
brings a strange restlessness; that restlessness which is one of
the characteristics of the unique atmosphere of O Paraiso.
Listening to you, I have
the opposite sensation that I felt when I listened O Espirito da
Paz. In this last one, even if the lyrics contained
sources of restlessness, the musical texture remained serene and
gave to the songs the unique colour of contradiction. When I
listen to your songs, the contradiction remains but it is
opposite; even if the lyrics are serene and sunny, the musical
texture prevail coating this lyrics with a shadowy mantle of
anxiety.
Maybe this feeling, which
is so unique in the work of Madredeus, but undoubtedly linked
with saudade, derives also from the "solitude" of the
voice of Teresa in these new songs. It has no instrument near
her, noone companion, and the girl of O Espirito da Paz, which
has become a woman in the meantime, travels a prey to her
feelings. I think that this image of a "lonely" voice
in a musical and emotional landscape which is so intense and
strong provokes in us a sort of tension which become anxiety.
In my regard, you, dear O Paraiso, gave me the strenght to see much more and much differently inside myself. So many memories wear you music and I remember them when I listen to you: women that I have loved, difficult days, easy days, moments and instants that are part of you. In your music I see a part of me that maybe has disappeared, shipwrecked in the sea of the interior evolution, that evolution that you have helped and that you will continue to sustain