Portuguese guitarist Jorge Nuno had a stroke in October 2022 and four months later he underwent surgery to close a small hole in his heart. His solo acoustic guitar album Labirinto, which was recorded a year later at Namouche Studios in Lisbon (and mixed and mastered by pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro) reflects this experience and is a testament to his resilience.
Nuno is known for such free improvised and free jazz bands like Uivo Zebra and Voltaic Trio. He expands in Labirinto his musical language and pushes himself into the most uncompromising and free regions, inspired and enriched by writer Rui Baião’s introspective and poetic prose («desligue & volte a ligar», turn off & on again in Portuguese, attached to the album), with the motto by Greek writer, poet and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis: «The castrated won’t enter in Paradise!», and adorned with photographer Nuno Martins’ artwork. Labirinto is a life-affirming and fearless album that sounds like a new sonic phase in Nuno’s musical journey that ties his genre-defying free-minded aesthetics to the legacies of American primitive guitar, noise and minimalism, and is charged by a restless energy.
Break It Down was recorded two months after Nuno’s stroke and features a quartet with producer Flak (aka João Pires de Campos) on analog drum machine., bassist Hernâni Faustino, tenor sax player José Lencastre and Nuno on electric guitar. This quartet was recorded and mixed by Flak and the album was mastered by American guitarist-sound engineer James Plotkin. Marins’ suggestive photo is used for the cover artwork.
This quartet brings Break It Down into the heavy and seductive dub landscapes of Bill Laswell. All the music of this ad-hoc quartet was improvised and relies on the manipulated pulses of Flak’s irresistible analog drum machine and Faustion’s fat electric bass lines. This massive rhythm section allows Lencastre and Nuno to soar into atmospheric, funky dub grooves and dive into a thorny kind of fusion. As the album progresses, the temperature of this volatile stew rises steadily, the pulses become faster, denser and more powerful and it reaches its cathartic climax with the soulful storm of the 19-minute title piece.
Eyal Hareuveni
Jorge Nuno (acoustic guitar, electric guitar), Flak (analogic drum machine), José Lencastre (tenor saxophone), Hernâni Faustino (electric bass)
