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Renato Diz / Peter Traunmueller — Descriptions or Useless Subtitles and Meaningful Sublimations
(Bandcamp W&J Productions no#, 2024, DL)

by Henry Schneider, Published 2024-08-28

Descriptions or Useless Subtitles and Meaningful Sublimations Cover art

Renato Diz is a Portuguese transdisciplinary auteur based in New York and Miami, as well as the founder, CEO, and recording artist at W&J Productions. This hundred-dollar word “transdisciplinary” required a bit of research to understand the meaning. Apparently transdisciplinary work involves collaborators from multiple disciplines in a co-equal partnership, in which they collectively define and develop new conceptual understandings, theoretical models, etc. that move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. So as a transdisciplinary auteur Renato develops works and concepts that interweave photography, video, cinema, poetry, philosophy, martial arts, drawing, sound design, and electronics. Renato’s collaborator on this new release is Peter Traunmueller, an Austrian drummer, pianist, composer, arranger, and educator based in New York City. Peter's fascination with all kinds of styles and aspects of music and his willingness to stay open to new artistic possibilities and approaches was a natural fit for Renato’s take on art. The result is Descriptions of Useless Subtitles and Meaningful Sublimations, a multimedia project (album, art, and poetry book) that took six years to create. They envisioned the album as a multi-sensorial ecosystem containing thirteen interdependent organisms, each containing a musical soundscape, a poem, and a visual artwork. The end result is a collection of avant-garde musical experiments without that sterile academic sound, that rely heavily on Peter’s percussion, along with Renato’s synths and sonic explorations. The music can be quite minimal at times, making judicious use of silence and individual instruments and sounds. Some of the pieces can be quite delicate. The track titles fit well with the album title, e.g., “now and then, with the strength of zero.” But one thing that does bother me is that all the song titles are lower case, a pet peeve of mine. The accompanying booklet contains unsettling artwork and poetry for each track, which is then left up to the intrepid listener to digest. Descriptions of Useless Subtitles and Meaningful Sublimation is an adventurous album that should appeal to fans of music that links the avant garde to experimental rock.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Peter Traunmueller

More info
http://renatodizpetertraunmueller.bandcamp.com/album/descriptions-of-useless-subtitles-and-meaningful-sublimations

 

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