ORKESTRAFRIA
Album EROSION/DISAPPEARANCE explores the sonorities of an ongoing geological phenomenon, an environmental catastrophe.
Atafona is a district of the municipality of São João da Barra, located on the north coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is being destroyed by coastal erosion.
Since the phenomenon accelerated around 60 years ago, the waves have destroyed more than 500 buildings and fourteen blocks of the town have been completely submerged. Climate change, regional events, the influence of the wind, the characteristics of the waves, the astronomical effects of the tides and the transport of sediment by coastal currents. Scientists believe that the convergence of all these factors in a single location on the Brazilian coast helps to explain what happens in Atafona.
The project results in six musical pieces, composed of the soundscape of an environment in devastation: the advance of the sea, the north-east wind altering the natural design of the coast, the incessant and unpredictable shifting of the dunes, the reverberation of the sea currents in the already submerged structures, the waves sharpening the ruins and the electromagnetic fluctuations of the thorium present in the monazite sand of the beach. These samples, obtained through field recording and moulded by digital processing, acquire polyrhythmic gestures and are added to electronic textural lines, which together propose a non-contemplative listening, grounded in a reinterpretation of the inherent violence in Atafona's disappearance.
EROSION/DESAPARATION recounts the fury of nature demanding back the space that is its own.