Tetine - After The Future (Slum Dunk Music 020)

After The Future is Tetine’s new album - a 11 track electronic/experimental album to be released on March 24th 2023 on Slum Dunk Music. In this release, Tetine’s Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner are joined by cellist Yoko Afi, who becomes a third member of the group and contributes with compositions, arrangements, vocals and additional keyboards.

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We’ve been writing new material as a trio since the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. 
An organic and electro-acoustic impulse that translates our need of self-archiving, re-inventing and auto-cannibalising Tetine's past, present and future in order to explore other aural landscapes and modes of composing intuitively, while at the same time, re-experiencing moments of our trajectory as a hybrid and diasporic music organism. 

As an album, After The Future derives from our vinyl Music For Breathing – a respiratory, meditative, and improvisatory piece of DIY 
tropical-mutant-punk “chamber music” written for cello, voice, piano, organ, and electronics. Recorded during the intense period of heatwaves that hit London between July and August 2022, in a small studio set up in our apartment, this album comprises of 11 distinct yet complementary reflective tracks. 

Sonically and lyrically, After The Future explores the fluxes, atmospherics and mutations of time and space, timbre, voice, and rhythm through themes/subjects such as hearing loss, menopause, memory, oppression, immigration, death, futures (and no-futures), disorientation, anachronisms and digital capitalism. It builds an expanded suite of unexpected 
electro-acoustic textures by making use of repetition, minimalistic motives, simple melodies, processed vocals, chromatic harmonies, free counterpoint, and atonalism.

Conceived as an ode to the poetics of slowness, suspension, and unfitness, whilst echoing an unconditional love for Beckett’s philosophical theatrics of existence and un-communicability, the record explores the warmth, melodiousness and haunted fluidity of the cello in combination with beatless atmospheres in tracks such as “And Still The Earth”, “Music For Breathing”, “Inverno” and Always at War”), or through electronics and voice in “After The Future [Eldorado A Vapor]”, “Spaced Out in Paradise”, “No Fim Da História”, “Disorder of Desire”. It also includes a re-recording of "Três Tristes Tigres [Circe em Paz]” by Brazilian underground post punk band Divergência Socialista, originally written by Bruno Verner and marginal poet Marcelo Dolabela in 1988.

After the Future evokes the exhaustive and current transitory moment we live in: a place and time where language runs out, communication and information lose their functions, sound, sense and meaning do not correspond. Facts do not correspond to contexts. Spaced Out in Paradise. The last degree of the structure, the 
loss of memory. The lost voice. A nausea. It responds to the vertigos experienced in contemporary polluted environments through political, social and philosophical mutations, whilst evoking the secret ontologies of objects and architectures around us, and their echoes and ethics. 

The pieces you hear in this album were composed, arranged, and recorded with the joy and melancholy of “those who do not know and discover” as Brazilian poet and anthropophagist Oswald de Andrade would say. “Agile and candid as a child”. In other words, “with the arrogance of a second childhood” as Derek Jarman once put it.