Radboud Mens & Fernando José Pereira - The Inoperative Suspension of a Stoppage CD

Radboud Mens already has a long career as a sound artist. He started creating noise-machines in 1988. In the early 90’s he attached contact-microphones to dog’s brushes that he used to destroy vinyl records by scratch-playing them. He released his first drone CD in 1995. He builds his own acoustic instruments and sound-installations that he uses in his compositions.

Fernando José Pereira is a multidisciplinary artist with a career of almost three decades. To quote Michael Snow (one of his main references): "My paintings are made by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor. Sometimes they all work together.” As a musician, he has worked almost exclusively as a member of the Haarvöl project, with which he has released around 14 albums on different labels. 

From Radboud Mens & Fernando José Pereira: 

“This is our first collaboration. It was time and duration that brought us together, and as such, this is one of the essential features of the work into which we immersed ourselves to make this album.

We would therefore like to share some concept notes which were important to us in developing this project.

Our time, without time, is a condition undergoing naturalisation, in other words, it finds that reality is an ally and offers no resistance. Today's reality is a laboratory in which the players are anaesthetised and therefore dazzled by their relationship with reality. Being dazzled, as we know, leads one to become somewhat blind, in a good way, shall we say, while the anaesthetic effect lasts... but then the awakening might be far from pleasant.

This record seeks to take up a position in territory outside of anaesthesia. It therefore wants to bring back the possibility of time... again. Retrieving the constituent layers of time is like thinking about the past, the present and the future.


The title refers to a possible suspensive deactivation of the stoppage. It is, more than anything, a desire. A realisation that the stoppage is in no way a passive activity. Its inoperative deactivation introduces elements which structure it in a different form. It is thus a stoppage which wants to activate the sensitive. Its main tool will therefore be to use one of the questions indelibly linked to time, but of the greatest importance: duration. This reaffirms the resistance to time without time, to the machinic temporal compression that levels all and which, above all, establishes a kind of all-encompassing impatience. With everything and, as such, with art and music obviously included. We know that none of this is new, that there is an entire current of musicians and artists who, over the last few decades, have been exploring this option. What we are aspiring to is to join this lineage and contribute, in our own dimension, to this ongoing and already extended cry for attention. We know, however, that conditions are worsening, and that impatience is spreading daily into new and broader territories in which the sensitive can in no way escape. Quite the opposite.

The whole record was conceived according to a constructive logic that induces contemplation and, therefore, duration. And yet, as we have seen, in a world that is set up to create the opposite effect, in other words, in a context of acceleration. Duration, in its intrinsic need for constant attention (let’s recall the notion of deep listening) interferes in temporalities that are distant from the linear acceleration of contemporary time. It surreptitiously inserts itself into a position of principle, absolutely politicised, by enhancing another fruition of time, far from the idea of the ephemeral time of the event, or even more radically, far from any logic affected by the first order of late capitalism: the commodification and commercialisation (with programmed and increasingly compressed obsolescence) of all reality.

A note for the almost paradoxical intentionality of trying to embody this positioning, very close to reality, through the abstraction of sounds. To this end, we resort to a fundamental aid that comes to us from outside: the semantics of the track titles. All of them, in some way, deliberately interfering in a territory that is not theirs, but trying to remove from the frigidity of abstraction these sounds that want to belong to the real and to position themselves as a solidary hypothesis of resistance to the annulment of time.

One last note for the title of the last track of the album. A very fitting tribute to one of the makers of moving images who was most sensitive to these issues, and who perhaps for this reason was known as the "last of the modernists", whose long sequence shots allowed us to immerse ourselves in that time absolutely immersed in the duration contained in his films. Our notion of modern has nothing to do with the modern to which we pay homage here in the form of a film director. Perhaps one of the necessary tasks in this time without contemporary (modern) time is to demodernise, as stated by the theorist Irmgard Emmelhainz, that is to say, to return to a human time that moves away from the derealisation of machine temporalities (essentially digital) fascinated by the reigning and anaesthetising instantaneity. 

This is, therefore, also an absolutely de-anaesthetic1 record.”

English Translation: Paula Grilo and J.F.