Le Almeida "Aulas" LP

In the middle of the pandemic I realized a lot of things, the biggest of them was that I had had some kind of great luck lately. 2019 was the first year that I spent almost all of it away from home, in countries that I couldn’t even speak the language, it was an incredible and challenging experience, it was hard to come back the same, even more after being part of a band that I always loved, this is still a dream. On our way home in 2019, Casaes and I had our flight delayed because of a blizzard for another day and we missed Christmas in Brazil. I was chosen as my mother’s secret santa at the backyard Christmas party here at home, I missed it, but Leticia made a video of her giving clues before opening the present while I flew home on Christmas night. I keep the gift with a lot of affection, it’s a picture frame with a picture of us on my birthday in 2019.

On March 13, 2020 we reopened Escritório after a renovation, it was a Friday, it had been two years since we had lost my father. It was this weekend that everything closed with the pandemic and I felt what was happening, I stayed home for a long time, my grandmother at that time said that my mother was very calm because I was home. I started to ride my bike every morning around the neighborhood and started to take some analogical pictures of landscapes. In May, exactly on mother’s say, my mother had a fall at home, it was the rupture of an aneurysm, we lost her in a very sad way, me and Leticia went through an immense suffocation with the hospital, with people who did not care that our mother was dying, we did everything. She was my sun, she guided the greatest balance.

We always had some big symbologies at home with dates, birthdays. After our parents went through those dates that were theirs and ours I think it became more difficult, even distressing. Between my birthday and my mother’s (jul/aug) date I started to create some routine of recording, trying to put together a record, find friends at Escritório to record, Bigú was coming back, a lot of things on my mind. I went back to recording at home, in a house that was still new to me and with a window where I can always see the moon, almost framed by the window so well fitted. I took care of the car that was my mother’s, that my father drove. In it I listened to my mixes of what I was recording, I reconnected with the neighborhood, this car always had an incredible vibration, we always appreciated it, my mother paid for it with the convenience store that she had in front of the house where we lived. I always had the best reference of autonomous work inside the house, getting organized. Aulas made me reorganize in a strange moment, during my routine of recordings I resumed some works at home.

Some tracks were things I had started and dropped, I started from this point and the new things I recorded very fast without thinking so much, in this situation I started to record more carefully on the timbres on what would otherwise just a sketch. This all made me put something out. The goal was to release at Christmas because of our affection, his birthday, without him. I can think of many moments in several tracks that I recorded thinking and feeling a strength of the two, who always supported me a lot in this path so uncertain and crazy. While recording I started to explore two instruments I had bought from a widow in Boise, USA where Casaes and I lived for a month, a metalophone and a theremin. The connection with death in that period made me connect some things, thinking with value that I was using something with affection and care what was of someone who took care for so long would perhaps bring only good energy. I got some very old amps in a pawn shop in the center where the owner of the place had told me that the amps were from a gentleman of some ninety years old and a few years who had died recently. I used one of these amps a lot on the record and during some mixes of inserts and collages I reopened some old boxes of tape that Joãozin and I had found years ago on a sidewalk in the neighborhood of Flamengo, they were tapes about occultism, esotericism, poetry, meditation. All with many notes, there I discovered that these tapes were of a woman, some with her poems, declared by her. I’ve been taking some of these tapes since we found them, but there are so many boxes of tapes that I’ll have to discover and travel little by little.

Aulas is dedicated to my parents Antonio Carlos and Sonia Maria, the first thing I do without them. It is also dedicated to my sister Leticia <3 (who plays the metalophone on the first track!) and my Grandma Lena, who helped me with the cover, the seams and life over the years. I love you