Tetine - Music For Breathing

Musicians/artists Eliete Mejorado, Bruno Verner and cellist Yoko Afi from Brazilian experimental trio Tetine present Music For Breathing at The Showroom – an audio-visual performance featuring their unusual blend of atmospheric electronica, mutant DIY chamber pop and spoken-word, based on their most recent albums Music for Breathing and After the Future, out on Slum Dunk Music in 2023.

Music For Breathing was born as a respiratory, meditative, and improvisatory piece of DIY tropical mutant-punk-funk chamber music written for cello, voice, piano, organ, electronics and video, responding to our planetary ecosphere in erosion, and to the disorientation experienced in relation to various polluted environments in political, social and philosophical transitions.

The performance is an ode to Earth’s ancestral future as the only possible future. One that was already here: a non-human cosmic, forested and aquatic inherited future moved by the movement of rivers, trees, the stars, insects, birds, plants, landscapes, stones, light, the sky, and the sun. Its music builds an expanded suite of beautiful and unexpected electro-acoustic textures while making use of minimalistic and chromatic motives, atmospheric soundscapes, spoken melodies, free-counterpoint, and atonalism.

On Music for Breathing

‘We’ve been writing new material as a trio since the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. Much of the inspiration behind the music came from ideas about respiration, asphyxiation, panic, the virus itself, and vertigoes experienced in polluted urban environments in political, social, and philosophical transitions. We were engaged in translating a persistent sense of claustrophobia and the state of insecurity that took hold of the world, while at the same time, channelling a real desire for collective change, for a greater understanding of the cosmos. One, in which ideas of ‘production’ and ‘progress’ – often propagated by those in power - can no longer make sense in the fractured planet we live in.

The pieces you’ll hear were composed, re-arranged, and recorded by the three of us with the joy and melancholy of “those who do not know and discover”. “Agile and candid as a child” as Brazilian anthropophagist Oswald de Andrade would claim in 1924 in his Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil. But also, “with the arrogance of a second childhood” as Derek Jarman once put it.
Bruno Verner, December, London 2023

Tetine is supported by Help Musicians UK.