Edições Nodar present a digital compilation with 45 tracks and over five hours of duration, corresponding to the years of activity of the duo ja_dijiste, formed by the Portuguese sound artist (and Binaural/Nodar director) Rui Costa and by the spanish sound artist Iñaki Ríos.
ja_dijiste was an improvised electronic music duo that was publicly active between 2001 and 2003.
Iñaki Ríos and Rui Costa discovered each other’s work in 1998, when both were publishing solo tracks on various online music repositories. Thereafter, they started to correspond and to exchange their onw recordings, which revealed a huge aesthetic and political compatibility between them. Both of them were at the time part of the free improvised music circuits although they didn’t strictly adhere to its language, which over time became more and more formatted despite its “free-form” pretensions, but rather to its ethics in which, amongst other aspects, the artist is seen in a desacralised way, devoid of an “aura”, merely as a “craftsman” who shares his work with other artists and the audience who want to listen and don’t wish any other form of credit or notoriety. Furthermore, Rui Costa and Iñaki Ríos incorporated in their solo work and explored in their ja_dijiste project the critical reading of the then embryonic “laptop music” or “microsound” (which is the music that explores the capabilities of real-time digital sound processing), while seeking a more spontaneous, “lo-fi” and “raw” expressiveness, as opposed to a kind of music that is the result of an affected expressiveness, one that is enchanted by mere “digital fireworks”.
This collection includes two self-published CD-R’s: are_mos from March 2001 and rmz.fne.ptb from March 2002. The first of them was built from a studio session in which the duo proposed to explore the tension between the laptop as a “brain” that digitally processes sound and a “body” that is capable of producing its own “real” sounds and allows gestural interaction on it (percussive, for instance). rmz.fne.pt consisted of a series of miniatures using are_mos as raw material.
On 16 and 17 June 2001, Iñaki Ríos, Rui Costa and Pablo Rega (a musician from Galicia, on guitar, electronics and objects) held a creative “retreat” in the village of Nodar (São Pedro do Sul, Portugal) in which they conducted a series of improvisation sessions. The result of this was a collection entitled “encuentro en nodar” that is publicly presented for the first time in this collection.
The remaining tracks in this collection consist of recordings of concerts given by ja_dijiste in various venues and/or festivals in Spain and the United States, namely:
6odum, Chicago (USA): 12.Feb.2002
Candlestick Maker, Chicago (USA): 13.Feb.2002
Eyedrum, Atlanta (USA): 15.Feb.2002
Ex Machina Music Festival 2002 Bilbao (Spain): Dec.2002
Concert in Medina del Campo (Castilla-León, Spain): 24.Jan.2003