Telectu

This bundle brings together the two 2026 Holuzam reissues from the richest years of Telectu: Off Off, the double LP the duo financed and released themselves in 1984, and Performance, their first live album, recorded at the Cerveira art biennial in August 1984. The long loop that opens Performance echoes Palolo, the side-long piece that closes Off Off.

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.

When Off Off came out around June 1984, one couldn’t speak of an independent music scene in Portugal. Warm Records’ vague existence didn’t have any impact and Dansa do Som’s inaugural release appeared only in December. 10 years after the revolution, after two IMF interventions, a lot of political instability (not to say turmoil, in the first couple of years) and the natural excesses of a sudden burst of freedom, the Portuguese consumer had more choices but a generally poor standard of living. There was no entrepreneurial culture and serious second thoughts about investing private money in risky ventures.

After many complaints about the whole music scene (institutions, critics and record label executives, popular and classical music alike), something that would continue well beyond the end of the decade, Telectu decided to finance, record, produce, release and sell an album with complete independence from outside structures. Their karmic reward was profit. According to Vítor Rua, Off Off was the only album fully payed by the duo and the only one that really payed off. Not an easy accomplishment for a double LP housed in a large (also double-sided) screenprint with complicated cuts and folds. The artwork was conceived by António Palolo, a friend and multidisciplinary artist. It was based on a collage of heavily saturated and xeroxed polaroids framed in shocking pink and green. Palolo was considered the third member of Telectu, regularly producing slides, video and other visual support for their shows. The inspiration for the type of cover came from GRM’s Gramme series.

Off Off is undoubtedly a seminal album in the history of electronic music, as much Heldon as Fripp & Eno, jazz and American minimalism, cosmic out-thereness, mantric miniatures. Telectu at the height of their powers, still very early on, delivering an album-manifesto advocating intermedia art and the fierce independence of Portuguese musicians «from the scum of capitalist music industry monopolies. It’s a path to follow, albeit one that requires enduring hardships and retaliation from music industry gangsters.» Despite a few journalists deemed «capable of being free», the media are «enslaved by the dominant and fascist imbecility of the speculators of light music.» Off Off is addressed to those journalists «and to an audience angry at the cultural misery imposed upon us [...], certain that this music will open new horizons of musical pleasure in the conception of Portuguese avant-garde music, and in the open consciousness of us all. Off Off repeats Freedom.»

Performance: 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.

Off Off: edition of 300 copies. Exact reproduction of the original folded screenprinted cover (69.7 x 62.3 cm when open). Screenprinted inner sleeves.