Terrains Vagues is the first Wergo portrait of the Portuguese composer Luís Antunes Pena, with works from 2000 to 2012 for double bass and drummers, organ, cello, thirty cymbals and fixed electronics. Computers and instrumental and electronic resynthesis are at the centre of his work, and so is what he calls a "consciousness of uncertainty", which shakes the apparent clarity of the score.
Antunes Pena was born in Lisbon in 1973 and studied composition at the Escola Superior de Música there with Evgueni Zoudilkine, Christopher Bochmann and António Pinho Vargas. After moving to Germany in 1999 he studied at the Folkwang University and its Institute for Computer Music with Nicolaus A. Huber, Dirk Reith and Günter Steinke, and he names Gérard Grisey at IRCAM and Emmanuel Nunes at the Gulbenkian Foundation as decisive influences. He lives in Cologne, has taught composition and electronic music in Karlsruhe, Zurich and Essen, and performs with the groups ruído vermelho and MONOPASS. The performers are the double bassist Edicson Ruiz, the percussion group Drumming Grupo de Percussão under Miquel Bernat, the organist Dominik Susteck, the cellist Francesco Dillon and the drummer Nuno Aroso.
In Im Rauschen Rot (2010) for double bass, four drummers and electronics, a quasi-regular pulse is constantly displaced and disturbed by intoxicated sounds, and the music draws its energy from that infiltration. Eyjafjallajokull (2010) uses the unusual sounds of the organ of the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne, its mechanical and percussive side. For the electronic Vermalung I – Western Music (2005/2012), he analysed the opening minutes of the soundtrack of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, filtered out the rhythmic information and built a new piece on it. The cello solo Winterlich ruhende Erde (2000), its title taken from Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, unfolds a dance out of modulations of silence and returns to it.
The Música para 30 Metais (2012) frame the title. They need a set of thirty cymbals with overlapping resonance spectra, and produce noise-like sound from it. The second part is called Terrain Vague, and stands between Em folia, sempre and In Construction 1-5. A second Wergo portrait, Caffeine, followed in 2016.
CD, total running time 75'40", released in 2013 by artist.cd / Wergo as ARTS 8119 2.
