Two Virgins, 2023, Eurorack modular synthesizer, Western Electric 16A Replica, power amplifiers

Gnration, Braga

Made between 2022 and 2023, Two Virgins is the new work by João Pimenta Gomes. Through an installation, the Portuguese visual artist and musician presents two sound pieces composed in parallel during that period, connected through a device that links them. Starting from the idea of false stereo, João Pimenta Gomes creates two sound compositions of fixed duration, but of variable perception, using the Eurorack modular synthesis systems he usually uses to install and manipulate sounds in space.
Two Virgins follows visually another work he recently presented, Poly-Free, and marks a new approach by João Pimenta Gomes in the construction of sounds. Maintaining the sound matrix he uses – exclusively the voice – he changes the environment of the composition, and all the music presented in this installation was composed in transit during about 80 train journeys and using only the computer and headphones. Not being able to measure the impact of this context in the sonority of these pieces, the constant presence of a drone in the work may have originated from that confrontation with the landscape. Although composed separately, João Pimenta Gomes imagined them as Siamese pieces, in a question/answer relationship, of individuality compromised by the physical space, of two bodies seeking a single end.
João Pimenta Gomes (Lisbon, 1989) studied Music Production, Photography, and Drawing. His artistic practice starts from references in the field of music and explores the relations between space and body through the manipulation of modular synthesizers, images, videos and objects. Providing encounters between the analogical and the digital, the sensorial and the conceptual, it is at the intersection with performance and live events that the artist amplifies these relations and encounters extending them to the interaction with the spectator.

Photos: Adriano Ferreira Borges / gnration