Uliel Boca Muralha

Originally written to accompany Catarina Miranda’s ambitious Boca Muralha dance piece, a duet inspired
by ancient Greek deities of vengeance the Furies, this tightly-coiled experiment comes off like Steve Reich
in a k-hole. Saldanha makes use of a delay to manipulate and control the two voices, freezing fragments
and curving them into slippery vortexes. Raw syllables are repeated, intersected and phased from staccato
passages into operatic, rhythmic choruses, time-stretching snowballed clusters of ululations.
Theatrical but never overblown, the music is boldly unadorned, preferring to highlight the idiosyncrasies
of the methodology than resort to extraneous processing. There’s little if any reverb: Miranda and Saraiva’s
voices sound almost obnoxiously dry, which only serves to further harden their impact. Glassy and cloying,
the repetition is taken to extreme levels; Saldanha’s usual noisy maximalism is nowhere to be found, but his
mischievous streak is omnipresent.
The vocals bounce left and right like a Reichian call and response, and while complex rhythms do eventually
form as he futzes with the loop points, the music starts to dissolve into a spellbinding purr. At times almost
alarmingly unadorned, it’s a brave and supremely mind-altering release from a promising new label