Adolescência

Ricardo Eizirik: adolescência for five performers and light (2022/23, WP)

Carola Schaal (Clarinets)
Roberto Maqueda (Electronics and Amplified Percussion)
Jennifer Torrence (Noise Generator)
Francesco Palmieri (Electric Guitar)
Håkon Stene (Modified Drum Set and Amplified Percussion)

Ricardo Eizirik (Live Electronics)

When the Brazilian composer Ricardo Eizirik, who now lives in Zurich and Berlin, plans a project on adolescence, one can really be curious – Eizirik has never avoided clear aesthetic positions despite a deliberately extremely heterogeneous artistic position. His music likes to make contact with pop cultural phenomena, and so he also describes his latest project adolescência as “celebration and (meta-)reflection on archetypes of aggression in youth culture and music (specially focusing on the period around the popularisation of the internet: 1990s-2010s).” Eizirik’s own youth experiences in Brazil, when he played in punk, hardcore, drone, metal, indie, and noise rock bands, are incorporated, as well as finds of youth aggression from hip-hop, electronic, or improvised music. But it is always about a kind of meta-level, about staged archetypes related to these musical performance practices; think, for example, of dark club rooms, booming basses, stroboscopic flickering, or minimal lighting moods that amplify the movements of the musicians inside through shadows or small changes in color. For the premiere of adolescência in Darmstadt, Ricardo Eizirik has assembled a hand-picked ensemble (including our two percussion tutors Jennifer Torrence and Håkon Stene), which together with him musically traces the path of adolescence.