53 Diamonds

TETINE: 53 DIAMONDS: A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES, CRIMES, FALSO-BRILHANTES AND OTHER POEMS (originally produced in 2013)

We are happy to announce the release of Tetine's spoken word album 53 DIAMONDS on Slum Dunk Music. Composed, recorded and produced by Bruno Verner & Eliete Mejorado – and initially presented as a sound installation at Galeria Jaqueline Martins' in São Paulo as part of their Glory Hole space curated by Bruno Mendonça - the record features a collection of electronic eerie sonic uncompressed landscapes and tales.

Comprised of 10 spacious, slow and atmospheric pieces for electronics, piano, fx and voices, these tracks can be listened both independently from each other or as an expanded narrative in the form of a soup opera. 53 DIAMONDS is a dark queer post-Marxist / post-internet fictional sonic critique on the vacuous world of art collectors, hegemonic cultural entrepreneurs, media moguls and other new colonialists.

The album acidly satirizes a series of superficial neoliberal clichés by vocally dramatizing forms of mindless consumerism, competitive behaviour, betrayal, submission, domination, the colonization of 'capitalistic dreams' and private property. It works as a satire of the old white elite with their self-important men and women and their relationship with questions of self-indulgence, expectation, use-value/exchange-value and panic.

On another note, the record investigates the economy of being 'given a present' and confronts it with narratives of buying & selling diamonds. These tracks are also 'cut-up tales' which fictionalise situations of abundance and were written by using cheap advertising late night TV selling-of-products language, eBay messages, internet crime stories and melodramatic interjections & talk as their source.

53 DIAMONDS is a hallucinatory collection of blind short stories, crimes and falso brilhantes. It explores ideas of 'boredom', 'property', 'selfishness' and 'freedom' in our current contemporary cultural condition and the collective fictions it produces in the realm of a self-perpetuating technological regime of control. It plays with notions of compressed culture, power and powerlessness, repression, rejection, betrayal, sexualized children, nationalism, race, Brazil, Latin America and the death of myths.

Combining modified voices, beatless wet soundscapes, dystopian basslines and harmonic tensions, was conceived as a poeticaly caustic, sexually charged commentary on contemporary superficiality and the mechanisms of controlled de-sublimation.