Part 1: 2000: In the beginning...

In January 2000 I began a music course under maestro Paulo Cesar Neves. He taught me the basics on music theory and keyboard playing. The most important for me was the theory because I didn't have any musical instrument at home, but I already had the ambition of creating ellaborate and grandiose music. With the new knowledge, I immediately tried to realize my ideas on the computer. I used the Fast Tracker II software, which basically is a multi-track sample-based sequencer. This software created so-called modules, which were files containing the sound samples and the musical instructions, such as: "play instrument X, note G-3, volume 80, special effect Y". The module format had been widely used for computer game soundtracks before the age of MP3. Video game and later computer game soundtracks played a big part in my musical formation in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and also stimulated my taste for electronics and later orientation towards electronic music.

By the end of 2000, I had already compiled my first experiments in the shape of an album, Avojo, and was in the middle of my first large-scale conceptual composition, Sequensea, in 10 parts.

Then I got my first synthesizer, a Roland XP-30, given by the family, and began the same process: I recorded several experiments, compiled them as the October to December album, and then tried a new composition, recorded in December, called Adventure. The main method I used, and still use today, was "instant composition", or structured improvisation: a carefully calculated improvisation process with some pre-set rules or some rules created as the music is played. By the end of the session, if the result is good it sounds pretty much like a regular composition. In March 2001 I finished Sequensea and focused entirely on the XP-30. Soon after that I recorded my first arranged compositions.

In September 2001, I reached a new level with a 20 minute instant composition that I called Loopsurf-Loopsearch. So with Loopsurf began the creation of what eventually became my first public release.

Part 2: The suite

After Loopsurf I rescued some melodic sketches from early 2001 and arranged a sequencer-based little piece, which became Floating Tones Around Mi. The title has three meanings: it's a description of the melodic line, because it's always revolving around the note E (mi); it's a reference to the fact that back then I was heavily influenced by the electronic musicians I had recently discovered ("tones around 'me'"); and it's a nod to Tone Float, the only album by a German group called Organisation which became Kraftwerk.

Under the influence of Jean-Michel Jarre and many classic symphonies, which is my favourite genre in classical music, I decided Floating Tones would be the first part of a suite. Each part was a breakthrough in my musical development. Lament was the first to include a found sound sample, a recording of the ambiance of a rainy afternoon from the window of my bedroom, where I did all the musical work. This ambiance has many interesting sound artifacts such as the passing of cars and the noise of my parents' bedroom window being opened. This can all be heard in the piece. The melodic line is derived from Floating Tones, reinforcing the "suite" feel of the music.

The two remaining pieces in the Round Mi suite kept following the lead of Mi. This time I attempted to write a proper orchestral score, since the XP-30 synth had many interesting orchestral sounds, and also because of my symphonic pretentions. I would use the music notation software Finale and write the entire two pieces with it, before recording the audio from the synth. I turned to Philip Glass for inspiration for one slow and one fast, climatic movement to end the suite. The slow movement was called Procession. Nowadays I find the sound is rather dry, but it was a good exercise back then, not only the writing process but specially the recording and mixing process, all done by myself in the bedroom. Still, at that moment, I was satisfied with the results of Procession, and I went for the final piece.

I turned again to an old sketch, a piece from Adventure. The new work eventually borrowed the title from another piece from Adventure, Leaving the Atmosphere. The original sketch was based on a simple progression which coincidentally also heavily featured the note "E". There was a repeating 16-note motif: E E E E   E E E E   F F F F   F F D D. Improvising with this motif I found an interesting chord, an inversion of C#m (E+G#+C#). The combination of these two elements formed the basis for the entire piece, a minimalist exploration of arpeggios of C#m and other chords around it. The note E pounds relentlessly throughout the piece, driving the "tones around mi" concept to its final consequences. As I progressed through the writing, I was excited to hear the results, but wondering how I would carry on with the plan: to record it all with the synth. It seemed like a step bigger than my legs.

Part 3: Clouds and the last recordings

In the meantime, I had a problem. I had an interesting piece, Loopsurf, already in its place as an album closer. I had a near-finished symphony-like suite that was supposed to be the album opener. That summed up to only 40 minutes of music and I didn't have the meat for this sandwich. I considered some of the earlier experiments and improvisations that I had recorded. They weren't good enough, specially when compared with what I already had for the album. I tried recording some new things, sketched some new concepts, but nothing worked.

One night, in January 2002, in the middle of the writring of Leaving the Atmosphere, I sat by the synth for some practising. I selected a few patches, turned the quadruple tap delay for a classic sequencer sound, turned the arpeggiator on, and started lazily customizing the percussive patch the arpeggiator was playing, changing one of the four base samples that make up the patch. Suddenly the sound got a more interesting and percussive character. I looked up the synth display and noticed that I selected a banjo sound as one of the four samples. It was a happy discovery. With this new customized arpeggio patch, an also customized oboe patch and some mellow pads, I began a new instant composition. This one was specially carefully played. I wanted to keep it as harmonic as possible; so whenever I played the oboe sounds, I kept the melodies inside the chords being played by the pads and arpeggio. I also wanted it to have a beginning, development and end. And I also wanted to do a Klaus Schulze emulation, just for fun. I played for 34 minutes nonstop; as I stopped the recorder I was already blown away by the music I had just played. I heard it many times, just after recording and in the following days. That was it. Despite starting as an emulation of Klaus Schulze, I concluded that the piece had my personality, and its structure was different enough fromthose usually created by Schulze. And it was also beautiful. It cried for a release. After carefully editing 3 minutes out just to make it less long, reducing to exactly 31 minutes, I called it Clouds, as an illustration of the music and also as a nod to the name of "Klaus", just like the wordplay in the Floating Tones title.

Now I had an almost entire album. I still had to finish writing Leaving the Atmosphere, and a mountain to climb: to record it. The writing was finally done March 2002. Now I had dozens of pages of an orchestral score sounding quite great and grand, and I had to play and record all that. Every aspect was difficult for me: playing the wide arpeggios, recording and mixing. There was a wide variety of instruments: piano, glockenspiel, flute, piccolo, church organ, timpani, tubular bells etc. They all needed to sound properly, and the mix had to be well balanced otherwise this arpeggiated whirlwind would sound like a mess.

Everything made between early 2000 and mid 2001 was mostly too simple, sketchy, too amateurish or assembled on the computer from rather poor samples. I was learning and experimenting. Now for the first time I had a near complete and reasonably good electronic music album. This time I had to release it.

Part 4: The deal

I started looking for a label among those related to the local progressive rock scene. I found one that had released a few electronic albums in the past: Som Interior. Claudio Fonzi, the label manager, was interested in my story and I sent a demo: actually the entire album but Leaving the Atmosphere, which was being recorded. I was surprised by his positive response; of course I believed I had a quality work in my hands, but an experienced person saying it was different.

I still had to finish the album and the suite finale. I took several months to get it done. In the end, despite some minor details here and there, to me it sounded even better than in the computer with its perfect playing. In July 2002, with this finale, the album was done.

I signed a record deal with Som Interior for 1000 copies of the CD. I thought it was a lot, but at that time no pressing plant in Brazil would press less than that, the digital music market didn't exist, and CD-Rs weren't considered. Just before sending the source CD-R to the plant, I decided that Loopsurf-Loopsearch wasn't good enough. In the following days I recorded many "final" versions of it - and many different master CD-Rs. So this piece marked the beginning and the end of the recording of my first album. For the album title, I tried many possibilities until I decided to simply shorten the first piece's title. Floating Tones Around Mi thus became Round Mi, a good title, since the written sketches for Floating Tones were the album's first steps.

As I'm also interested in visual designs and arts, I created the entire visuals for the cover and booklet. The front cover doesn't look so special nowadays, and looks much better printed, but it is in fact a treated photo I took myself of a portion of what I viewed from my bedroom window: what was "around me" all the time. All the other coloured graphics were derived from this treated photo. For the inlay, the graphics were black and white, also entirely created from a photo of myself sitting at a table; and the photo itself is included in the psychedelic montage.

+ + +

Just after declaring the music of Round Mi finished, I immediately started the second album. In August 2002 I recorded an entire CD-R with new pieces, all in the same method of instant composition, simply because I never had a lot of free time to further elaborate the pieces. One of those new pieces was very interesting but I wasn't too happy with the overall sound. I spent literally years playing almost exclusively this piece over and over, changing the patches and the mix, until it gelled into a new, compact composition, very different from its original form and quite different from everything else I had created... But this is already another story.

- Gustavo Jobim, January/2011

This work was the result of years of experimentation with the grand piano sounds of the Roland XP-30 synthesizer, my only musical instrument up to that point.

Each movement was recorded at one go, as an "instant composition". The piano sounds are treated in real time with filters and effects to produce the abstract electronic sounds that permeate most of the music.

In the final movement, I used an old external delay filter, borrowed from a friend, the percussionist Daniel Rosenthal. This filter provided additional distortion and unexpected - and interesting - effects, driving the piece towards pure noise. During a stretch of about 5 minutes near the end, I left the synth alone and the resultant sounds were a rich texture created by the feedback between the synth and the filter. I was actually on the phone at that moment. Then I returned to the synth to produce the final minutes of the piece.

During the process, one recording was always in a way or another complemented by the following one. As the work progressed, the resulting collection acquired a symphonic scope, a feature that is usual in my works. In this particular case, I felt that this could be the influence of Gustav Mahler's symphonies, always dramatic and noisy. I also felt that the free experimentation of Conrad Schnitzler influenced the directions of the sonic explorations. In the end I thought this actually sounded like Mahler modulated by Schnitzler, so I gave the work the title of Symphony No.1 and dedicated it to the two composers.

The movements were recorded in the following order: 2nd: Sep. 9th, 2004; 4th: Sep. 19th, 2004; 5th: Jan. 23rd, 2005; 1st: Apr. 24th, 2005; 3rd: May 22nd, 2005.

- Gustavo Jobim, January/2011

Thelmo Cristovam, sound inventor from Pernambuco, northeastern Brazil, was spending a few months in Rio de Janeiro. Two days before Christmas, in 2004, I attended a presentation of aggressive feedback music played by Thelmo and Filipe Giraknob, from Rio, at Plano B, Lapa, Rio de Janeiro.

After the show, I asked them to help me in my first solo concert, which was scheduled for a few weeks later at the same venue. They readily accepted the invitation. My first idea was that they would make the same feedback sounds on my concert. We met one month later in my house for a session, but instead of mixing desks and cables, Filipe brought his electric guitar and effect pedals, and Thelmo brought his sax and trumpet. And we recorded this improvisation presented here.

It was a rainy day, January 24th, 2005. The improvisation was lead by Thelmo, because his timbres were louder than everyone else's and had to be controlled. Consequently, Filipe and I also had to keep control of our sounds to keep the balance. The result is an apparently calm recording, but full of suspense, as if it's going to explode at any moment.

During the recording, we noticed that the sound of the rain was loud. For a short moment we stopped playing, and I opened the window. The microphone captured some of the rain: the sound of the fourth instrument, played by Nature. It was a sublime moment.

We were supposed to do a rehearsal before my show, but that never happened. In the day of the concert, they came with the same instruments from that first session. Despite not having rehearsed, that didn't make a difference: I just gave them the basic directions and the results were much better than I expected.

- Gustavo Jobim, November 6th 2005 (for the first edition of Tempochuva) - revised in August 2011

In 2006, as I continued the efforts towards the creation of the concept and first recordings for a follow-up to Round Mi, I decided it was time to change the subject and do something else, because I wanted to release something new right away. And this new thing should be simpler than the previous release (Symphony No.1), more electronic and less experimental.

I went back to the basics and recorded four electronic pieces without too much elaboration. The first three pieces are one-patch, no overdubs, instant compositions. The last is the only with additional synth layers for a more varied arrangement. The album title is another of my poor wordplays... This is one of my quickest productions, from the first recordings to the release.

- Gustavo Jobim, January/2011

Playing the synthetic piano patches on the Roland XP-30 synthesizer had always been fun and I always achieved interesting results quickly. As my discography progressed, I kept switching between general electronic sounds and synth piano. So after Round Mi (electronics), Symphony No.1 (piano) and MarCHian Sketches (electronics), it was time to go back to the piano for new, conceptual experiments.

The approach to making The Art of Boredom was to record and release it as fast as possible. During the two days that I took to record the album, I attempted to create a set of annoying and boring pieces. The main inspiration was Erik Satie and his invention of the musique d'ameublement ("furnishing music"): nondescript music to function as an ambient backdrop, as if it was a piece of furniture. He, in fact, invented the ambient music genre, decades before it became one of the main segments of current electronic and instrumental music. He, however, did not intend it to be boring. Nowadays we have all these sorts of boring ambient muzak, so I included this twist in the concept.

These pieces are meant to be heard as fun, conceptual sound organizations: nothing too deep or serious. I tried to indicate this everywhere: from the descriptive titles and subtitle to the liner notes and cover art. What began as a kind of a joke eventually yielded interesting results, with some nice moments such as the end of the last piece. I felt this album was an interesting development in my discography, driving me away from the usual electronic music influences that were too obvious in the first albums. The positive reactions by Artemi Pugachov, an experienced reviewer of electronic music, actually surprised me, and confirmed my suspicion that I had a unique set of experimental music.

- Gustavo Jobim, January/2011

Just after finishing my debut album Round Mi, in August 2002, I recorded some pieces already with the intention of making a second album. I couldn't, however, finish this project, so I spent the following years creating and throwing away different concepts and recording lots of stuff. In the meantime, I wanted to keep releasing new music, so I came up with three experimental albums: Symphony No.1, MarCHian Sketches and The Art of Boredom. After that last one, for the fourth time I was left with the mission of continuing Round Mi, an idea that by 2007 had become too old. All I had by then was an unfinished suite inspired by the Swiss surrealist painter H.R.Giger that included fragments dating back from those post-Round Mi recordings, a few other recordings and written notes. And I still didn't know what to do to turn these elements into a full album.

Giger is one of my main inspirations, among many painters and poets, specially from the dadaist and surrealist movements. So I developed the concept of an "abstract paintings" album, more or less in the genre of dark ambient and soundscapes. This style was in a way related to the Giger suite. But instead of doing just another experimental solo album, this time I decided to try something new. That was the Abstract Paintings double album - Volume 1: Solo; Volume 2: Collaborations.

I had already did some collaborative work before, such as the Tempochuva release, and it was time to do something bigger. I had a couple of collaborative recordings that had never seen a proper release, and lots of rough solo material. Those were the basis for a new collective album. So the music in this new album would be in the concept of "abstract paintings", still in the genre of experimental electronics, and inspired by surrealist and abstract art, at least from my part.

I'm often in contact with many different artists over the world, specially in internet mailing lists - particularly the list dedicated to the German group Faust. I pitched the idea, with the working title of Abstract Paintings, to the Faust list and other friends and colleagues. Each artist willing to participate would create with me one unique piece for the album. The collaborators would be free to do whatever they wanted, inside the Paintings concept. The final product would be released for free on the internet.

The response was excellent: 10 musical collaborators, including German legendary artist Conrad Schnitzler, who had been an inspiration for years. Some of the collaborators gathered their bands for the project. The sound material was sent back and forth over the internet. A few pieces began on my part: I would select an old, unreleased solo recording, or create something new, and then other side did the rest of the work; other tracks were made the other way around. Three pieces were based on the same set of few, short sound samples I created and sent to the collaborators. My idea was to see what different artists would do with the same material. Happily, the final results were indeed completely different from each other. These are tracks 1, 9 and 11. The two pieces predating the album project, tracks 5 and 10, fit in the concept and further increased the number of collaborators. Track 5, with portuguese artist Helder Correia, is a computer-assembled module based on sound samples - the method I used for my first experimental pieces in 2000 - and sounds from the Roland XP-30 synth. It's my last module-based piece. It was created in 2004 over the course of a few months and we weren't able to find a title for it, leaving it the Música Sem Nome (Nameless Music). Track 10 is from my first jam session with Leandro Theodorico, in 2005.

For the graphics I called Helder Correia again, told him about the project in which our old piece was to be finally released, and he did all the artwork. The cover and back cover photos are by another Faust list colleague, the photographer Ian Land. I put these together in a digital booklet. The collaborations album became Belles Alliances. The title shamelessly rips off Manuel Göttsching's 1980 album Belle Alliance, but this is intended as a homage, it's a good album and Manuel is one of the luminaries of electronic music. That title in plural seemed perfect for this project. The album was released in Sep. 1st, 2008.

Belles Alliances quickly became a full, complete, conceptual album on its own right, beyond my expectations, but the development of the solo half of the project, which kept the Abstract Paintings title, was slow. The Abstract Paintings solo album was never finished or released, becoming something else altogether...

- Gustavo Jobim, January/2011

The music in this album was entirely created with a small (about 250 kB) software synthesizer, the TS-404 V1.05 Beta. This synth is actually an ensemble of four very simple synthesizers, each played by an independent step sequencer. Depending on how you use it, you can layer these four modules to create rich, fat lead lines, or complex rhythms. Then you can export this melodic phrase or drum beat as an audio file, and work with this patch on other software to create different arrangements.

That's what the TS-404 is supposed to be used for. However, I began experimenting with it by just leaving the synth playing nonstop and changing the parameters on the fly. After playing for a while, I noticed I was actually creating rhythmic, minimalistic music, with everchanging melodies, beats and timbres. So to have a recording of a new musical piece, all I needed to do was to press "Record" on an audio processing software and carefully play the TS-404. So the repetition of the short loops the TS-404 produced was the foundation for all the music in this album, and each piece is largely a calculated improvisation, or "instant composition", a method I use very often.

As I'm always inspired by the pioneers of electronic music, the retro sounds produced by the TS-404 suited very well that particular period in late 2008, when, after finishing work on a big project, I wanted to play different sounds and had been listening to a lot of Cluster. Those sounds also evoked my long gone videogame-filled afternoons - videogame soundtracks were the first musical pieces that caught my attention at an early age, and still today I greatly appreciate a well-done game soundtrack. So, directly inspired by Cluster's Moebius, the first piece I recorded for this album was the Moebius Tape.

The computer used for this work was the one I had on my job desk, so for about two weeks, in the turn of the years 2008/2009, whenever I had some free time I'd be recording those pieces. In the following months I edited some of the music, and created some additional sounds. Being a musician that needs to have a day job in order to pay the bills, and considering how those pieces were created, the album title Trapped in a Day Job fit like a glove.

The graphics for this album were made in the "trapped" concept: mazes, a different one for each piece; and a monolithic skyscraper representing the idea of the title. The album was recorded inside a similar building. Ned Netherwood (author of the Was Ist Das? site) was kind enough of reviewing the music before its release; his review was also included in the booklet.

In 2009-2010 I divided my time between touching these pieces up, studying piano and compiling old studio leftovers and unreleased pieces. Eventually the audio production for Trapped was finished, and some of these pieces were presented at the [now defunct] myspace page, but the album as a whole laid dormant for a long time, until now.

In January 2011, the single Cat in the Blender/Arcade Times was officially released as a free download. And Trapped in a Day Job was finally released in March 26th.

The final results are relentless, slowly unfolding electronic music pieces in several different styles. Patient ears will be rewarded.

- Gustavo Jobim, March/2011 (revised in August/2011)

IN SEARCH OF BERLIN is a return to my first main influence, the style known as the Berlin School of electronics. The main features of this style are long and instrumental, often improvised, musical pieces; the rhythmic section is based on repetitive phrases played by sequencers, drum machines and effects; there is also the occasional addition of electric guitar and acoustic percussion. This began in the mid 1970s with artists from Berlin such as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel and Manuel Göttsching. They paved the way for the birth of many genres such as trance, ambient, new age, techno and others. However, many artists followed more faithfully the style of these pioneers, establishing the Berlin School itself as another subgenre of electronic music, which is still alive today.

I never completely abandoned the style, despite the fact that it appears more clearly only on my debut album, Round Mi (Som Interior, 2003). Since then, my albums have been showing my more experimental recordings.

IN SEARCH OF BERLIN shows the works more directly related to the Berlin School style, which were recorded between 2003 and 2009 and have remained forgotten and unreleased until now. All the pieces in this album were created using the method of instant composition, which is an improvisation played carefully, in a way that almost no extra sounds or editing is necessary. This way, the moment that the recording stops, the music is done, or almost done. This is a common method in the style and it is the way I've created almost all my works until today.

The instruments played in this album were the Roland XP-30 and MicroKorg synthesizers. The recordings were selected, organized and entitled according to the album project. The album was produced and mastered by myself, on my home computer, between 2009 and 2011. The album's playing time is 78 minutes; 26 of these were part of the mini-album MarCHian Sketches (2006), which was deleted because it was released in low-quality audio. These recordings are reintroduced here in a more comprehensive historical and musical context, and in superior audio quality. The remaining 52 minutes are music never released before.

British photographer Ian Land, who participated in the 2008 collaborations album Belles Alliances, kindly provided again two photos for the album’s front and back cover. The cover image for In Search of Berlin was selected by him, from two alternatives I selected from his vast archive. I did the booklet design. The album was released in 2011, October 29th - my 29th birthday.

IN SEARCH OF BERLIN is part of an ongoing project of archive releases. There are still many recordings made since the year 2000 that remain unreleased, but have already been selected and organized. The continuation of this work will be released soon.

- Gustavo Jobim, October 2011