Pedro Maia

In the last years I have been presenting several visual collaborations with Shackleton, all of them presented with different musicians and commissioned by different festivals.

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BEHIND THE GLASS – Shackleton + Anika + Strawalde + Pedro Maia – 2017

Behind the Glass is the unapologetically ambitious new project coming out of the overlapping creative forces of Shackleton, Anika, Strawalde and Pedro Maia. Shackleton – of Skull Disco and Honest Jon’s semi-fame – provides a vivid backdrop of infinitely detailed sonic complexity that conjures up something between devotional music and avant trance with the use non-standard time signatures often running against each other, an unusual and occasionally atonal sound palette, repetitive melodic motifs and a blatant disregard for the conventional 3 minute song format. Over this canvas Anika – perhaps best known for her self-titled debut album -narrates a tale of love, longing, fate and compulsion which stretches out in the style of a surreal fable. Her deadpan vocals and priestlike sermons meanwhile stand in direct counterpoint to the tales of unbridled lust, fury and the themes of dominance and submission in the world of love, romance and all their related afflictions. The whole is ably backed for the stage by keyboard maestro Takumi Motokawa and the human metronome Raphael Meinhart on mallets. The visual side sets Pedro Maia’s constructive and reconstructive filmic talents against the ink of legendary Berlin artist Strawalde.

Premiere at Berlin Atonal Festival 19/08/2017