This album is the result of an invitation extended to João Pais Filipe to develop a composition for the film Teocalli by the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Its original composition was presented in February 2024 at Batalha Centro de Cinema, during a performance that accompanied the screening of the film as part of a broader programme dedicated to the collective’s work, curated in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Based in Porto, João Pais Filipe (b. 1980) is one of the most acclaimed percussionists and composers on the contemporary Portuguese music scene. Over the years, as a soloist and in collaboration with other musicians – such as Valentina Magaletti and Burnt Friedman — he has pushed the boundaries of different musical conventions, often exploring ancestral ontologies through their sonic emanation.

In a dialogic exercise with the film by the Mexican collective (which was specifically created for the expanded performance context at Batalha), João Pais Filipe’s music explores a path of sensory purging, unrestrainedly interpreting the contingent and shamanic dimension that the collective introduces (and reclaims) in its multi-nature, politically charged cinema of agitation.

In the Aztec Nahuatl language (spoken in what is now central Mexico), the expression ‘teocalli’ has several meanings: it can indicate a ‘sacred place’, a ‘creative energy’ or something ‘divine’; it can also describe the pyramidal basement where temples are built. Between geological, natural, cosmic, human elements and historical illustrations, the film opens up multiple possibilities for cognitive and sensory immersion. It was precisely from this visual driving force that João Pais Filipe’s composition emerged, embracing its fractures, circularities and interruptions, in a state of trance.

The sonic power of this composition engages with the mythological and metamorphic dialectic of the film and of the collective’s own cinema — including its wide gamut of objectual, documental and human phantasmagorias, its poignant proposal of exhumation that absorbs us, haunts us and leads us to a meta-temporal and earthly understanding of the world.

In Thesis 71 of their Thesis on the Audiovisual, the collective affirms: “Speculative reason is the relational, anthropophagic and autophagic perspective of Shamanic Materialism.” João Pais Filipe’s sound composition doesn't merely aim to accompany Teocalli’s regenerative and liberating semantics. Instead, he proposes a musical spirit that manages to speculate on a certain sense of historical transcendence through the aural universe.