Renato Matos invented instruments, toys
Bryan Day invented instruments, FM radio
Samuel Lila sitar [Parte 2]

“In Autumn 2022, I was in Brazil for about a month and half over two trips for my day job, developing and building science museum exhibits, specifically for exhibit installation at a new science centre in the capital Brasília. While in the city, I organized a number of performances and workshops through friends in the local experimental music scene. During a workshop at a makerspace called Calango Hacker Clube, I was introduced to instrument-builder Renato Matos.

Renato was preparing for an art show, an exhibition celebrating his 70th birthday featuring instruments, paintings and sculptures. He's a well-known figure in Brasília, having made a name in the 1980's as one of Brazil's early reggae pioneers and over the decades has been building instruments and organizing productions that combine found objects with the materials used in traditional Brazilian instrument construction such as calabash gourds. We decided we should try to meet up and make some recordings together.

Through the help of some local musicians, we were able to meet at his home studio a couple of times to record. Our first session was recorded only with a room mic, so we decided that for our next session we should try to record each of the sound-sources individually. We amplified his instruments using contact microphones that I brought with me from the US and recorded the rest with a variety of microphones. Everything ran into a pair of 10-track recorders. After recording the first couple of sections, our recording engineer Samuel Lila mentioned that he had brought his sitar with him, and he joined us for one of the pieces. In the end we had nearly 20 channels of audio for each section, so it took quite a bit of time to edit them into the pieces we used for the final release.”
Bryan Day

Renato Matos is a musician, writer, actor and artist that seeks the limits of expressiveness in every medium he works with. In literature, he wrote a whole book using only palindromes, creating provocative and coherent phrases that can be read in both directions. In arts, his works can be defined as paintings, sculptures or music instruments, depending on how people interact with them.

In this collaboration with Bryan Day, Renato explores the limits of noise, creating music from unexpected sounds produced by instruments of his own making. His search for this form of expression started in the 1970's, when Renato sneaked into the music classes of the Swiss professor Walter Smetak at the Federal University of Bahia. Later Renato would encounter the works of masters like Luigi Russolo and Tom Nunn, an instrument inventor from San Francisco who passed away last year, whose influence should be noticeable in this recording.

Bryan Day is a sound artist, musical instrument designer, and conceptual artist based in San Francisco who has been active since the mid-1990's. Using scavenged electronics, repurposed mechanical components, and amplified materials, he re-imagines them into constructivist sound sculptures. Day has performed, taught workshops, and built sound installations across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
www.bryanday.net

A documentary film about Renato Matos, ZIRIG DUM BRASÍLIA | Art and Dream of Renato Matos: youtu.be/gYUiYhdltl4