Telectu

Performance is the first live album by Telectu, and the only record they ever released of their music and a performance-art piece captured in full as it happened. It was taped in August 1984 at the IV Bienal Internacional de Arte in Vila Nova de Cerveira, a small town on the Minho river at the Spanish border. It dates from the duo's richest and most distinctive years, the same months that produced Off Off.

Jorge Lima Barreto, jazz musician, critic and musicologist, played synthesizers and an electric lithophone. He also coined the term "minimal repetitiva" for his own music. Vítor Rua, who had left the pop band GNR, played guitars and electronics and ran the tape loops. Their tonemeister Luís Carlos Pereira recorded and mixed. Four of the pieces were soundtracks to performances by Manoel Barbosa and Grupo Neon. Barbosa had been one of the first performance artists in Portugal in the early 1970s and showed at Documenta 7. He did eleven live pieces with Telectu, and Lima Barreto remembered "bodies moving in symmetrical rhythms, violently executed". The cover is built from photographs of Barbosa's Cerveira piece Disgrm. Rua says the duo's walks through the village were a kind of performance too, with psychedelic t-shirts, ripped jeans and straw hats from the local market, "like pieces of nomadic art" crossing the quiet of the place.

The titles map out what the duo listened to. Eno to La Monte takes up most of side A: a long loop of gentle pressure in the spirit of Palolo, the side-long piece on Off Off. The process comes from Brian Eno, and the search for stasis is a homage to La Monte Young. Side B goes through five shorter pieces named after Glenn Branca, Robert Fripp and Fred Frith, John Cage, Terry Riley and the bassist Saheb Sarbib, who later played with them. None of it sounds like a tribute record. Every borrowing comes out as Telectu.

At the time the Portuguese press mostly ignored them. Rua told Público in 2018 that there was no circuit for them, so they could end up on a popular television show one week and opening for rock groups the next. Performance came out in 1985 on 3 Macacos, the duo's own imprint, with their first sleeve notes in English (in very broken English, as the label puts it). Today many more collectors want the original LP than own it.

Holuzam had 200 unused original sleeves and inserts in storage and no records left. The metal stamper had survived, so they pressed 200 new discs from it.

Edition of 200 copies. New pressing from the original 1985 metal stamper, in unused original sleeves with the original inserts and a booklet. A short static-like noise comes up just after the start of side A; it is in the stamper, not a pressing fault. The 40-year-old glue on the sleeve flaps can give way when opened, and a thin line of glue fixes it.