Blowing hands orchestra

BHO has an epicentre: three members whose different backgrounds and abilities are tied together to create a new band - a pop related, image and video driven, experimental, poetic and atmospheric approach to music.

After studying fashion design in Lisbon and working in New York and Berlin, Sara Bento de Castro settled in Berlin, where she founded the Gris Neutre label. Later she mainly worked in the areas of graphics and textiles as well as in fashion production and online management for the fashion label A.D.Deertz. She was a scholarship holder of the Google Developer Challenge Program and completed a nanodegree in Front End Web Development at Udacity, Inc.

Joana Pimenta dedicated her studies and investigation to anthropology. She co-founded the fashion brand Gris Neutre and co-curated the exhibition “Retornar - Traços de Memória”, within which she created a photographic Atlas. Her creative expression is deployed in poetry, photography, painting and dance. She co-founded the Hyperdekorativismus and has recently joined the Open Circle of the Plastic Arts Circle of Coimbra, Portugal.

Franz Schütte is a composer and producer who is based in Berlin. He has been working on numerous projects – of which JEANS TEAM might be the most recognized so far – that made him tour all over the world. At the Nadel Eins Studio he is also active as a recording-, mixing- and mastering engineer. He gives lessons in various audio topics as professor at Wave Akademie. He became co-founder of the Hyperdekorativismus movement.

The three of them met in autumn 2019, first in Berlin, then at (the Glien) Havelland, Brandenburg, then back and forth between the two locations. They talked, they listened to music, they read and discussed the basis of Hyperdekorativismus artistic movement. They realized, as time passed by, that in the mornings they were making music of their own – and not just listening to it; that they were writing poetry too; that some, if not a lot of images were being created (drawings, paintings, photographs). A web of echoes, a crystal of images formed in-between the edges of each of their gestures, of each of their phrases. And thus they realized that BHO was happening before them. They’d slip from chronos to kairos, and suddenly they were thinking Hyperdekorativismus with their own hands, they were creating something. It was just a matter of taking the chance, of catching the fruitful moment.

Frequent collaborators have since been present. First Fernanda Höhne, one of Hyperdekorativismus’s members whose voice we listen to, over Vivificante’s demo, reciting a poem created with Pimenta. She’s active in theatre, loves to draw, to dance, to make hip-hop DJ sets and to perform. And then also Vol, another hyperdekorativist, who is keen on reading and writing, constantly between fiction and philosophy.

No wonder how multilingual and multidisciplinary BHO’s approach to music is, diversity being a distinctive feature of their work. In the realm of ideas, it’s also clear a distinctive rejection of any contempt for life, any destructive tendency. Hence the themes of transparency and liberation, against opacity and imprisonment; hence the refusal to feed old inter-relational strategies of guilt and scorn or underestimation; hence the affirmation of love and joy and desire; hence the shared attempt to disrupt habits, to find new perspectives, new solutions; hence the tendency to free them all, and to do it musically, trying to find in atmosphere and repetition the immanent drive of life recreating itself, being always qualitatively different, new, unexpected.

The first BHO album reflects precisely this: unexpected perspectives emerging from a clearing. In the interval between one breath and the next, between one idea and the other that follows, between one word and its response, BHO takes time to contemplate and immerse on the intensity of experience, of sense, of existence. To be able to grab it, BHO intersects sound and image, word and video, and hopes to be opening up passages to the core of life’s richness and fertility.