Indelibly and courageously linked to various movements in this city, and paving the way for them outside this country, Tiago Miranda has, in more or less recent times, been seen essentially as a DJ and a careful producer of tracks between the expansiveness of the cosmos and the pulse of this land. Which might lead us to forget how closely linked he is to one or more of the lives of this house. A figure of multiple fearless faces, who has enjoyed cult and admiration for over two decades, he was, among many other adventures, at the genesis of Loosers or Gala Drop, he went through Pop Dell’Arte, incarnated in Tnt Subhead or Sea Power & Change, has maintained the Slight Delay entity with Alcides from time to time and founded labels such as Interzona or Ruby Red. In its new form, it’s important to think of the latter’s work as an imaginary link to what animates Pigxtar. It emerged in the epicentre of free music that, in the period between 2001 and 2009, boiled over with unheard of intensity, among countless releases on CD, cassette and vinyl in more or less limited forms, at the speed of that urgency, and which had Ruby Red releases by people like Fish & Sheep, Tropa Macaca, Valerio Cosi, Charles Cohen and Ed Wilcox or, of course, the Loosers themselves in a moment of infinite creativity.
Without such momentum ever having crystallised in time, without a properly told story – perhaps the recent release of David Keenan’s book in which he collects some of his illuminated writing for the Volcanic Tongue shop will bring some due access to memory – because all this existence is interchanged with more or less focus until today, we can take Pigxtar’s universe, so far still sparse, as spiritually aligned with this chain of events. As noise is no foreign matter to Tiago, we can go back a decade to the release of ‘Emotional Poverty’ on Márcio Matos’ dormant(?) Noisendo to find it there, but this is a whole other music, which is not exhausted by that booklet but lives on an equally lived search. Following the portal opened by something like SPK’s ‘At the Crypt’ and some Sterile Record releases for metallic percussion crutches, psychedelic dub strategies and mutt electronics overloaded in contact with very, very bastardised forms of rock and lo-fi devotion to kösmiche with material applied in the above period by noiseniks and explorers from the Michigan-Ohio axis – the extended Wolf Eyes and Emeralds family reviewed in the Hanson and American Tapes catalogues and chromes for exchange with Tusco/Embassy and Wagon. On the very recent cassette of the same name, we go from short incisive themes drenched in noise to the long fluorescent synth flow of the final loop, and it’s all part of the same vision. BS
