Life…Repeat!!! is the third solo album of Portuguese, Coinbra-based guitarist-compose-improviser-educator Marcelo Dos Reis (following Cascas, Cipsela, 2017 and Glacier, Miria, 2021), and the second that is released by his label Miria, created exclusively for his solo endeavors. The album was recorded in one take, without knowing when each piece would end, and with no overdubs, over one day at Academia de Música CNM in Coimbra (where Dos Reis teaches) in May 2024.

Dos Reis is known for his role in the bands Chamber 4, Fail Better! In Layers, and Frame Trio. The album title and its aesthetics capture Dos Reis’s daily, routine practice, where compositional ideas that were previously thought out are developed through improvisation around repetition, life experiences, and, obviously, «the pulse of music», but eventually, the music becomes more composed.

The centerpiece is the opening, 26-minute «Pulse». It begins like the opening, serene part of an Indian raga – the alap, where the basic, meditative guitar scale is explored and ornamented through repetitive motifs, while being resonated with a vibrating drone, often achieved by bowing the guitar, and gentle and innocent, wordless vocalizations. Later on, still following the narrative of an imagined raga, Dos Reis accelerates the basic motif and exposes the fragile emotional state of this piece, the jor. The following three pieces – «Rhythmical Throbbing», «Single Vibration» and «Burst of Sound», are shorter, «Rhythmical Throbbing», relies on an urgent, rhythmic-percussive motif. «Single Vibration» sketches an exotic, enigmatic drone with a bowed, heavily resonating guitar, and the last piece, the beautiful «Burst of Sound», returns full circle to the serene, dreamy opening of Life…Repeat!!!
Eyal Hareuveni

Marcelo Dos Reis (guitar, prepared guitar, voice)