(As Nuvens Mercuriais de Alpheratz)
acousmatic music; computer-generated recording.

Duration: 5' 05''
Channels: 2

“The Mercurial Clouds of Alpheratz” (“As Nuvens Mercuriais de Alpheratz”) is an acousmatic music composition in two channels composed in May 2018 specially for the microFOLIA project of the Núcleo Música Nova of Curitiba-PR, Brazil. The work is made by the superimposition of three layers of musical elements, namely a choir of seven propane water heaters, which sing thanks to a surgically precise and intense use of band-pass filters, flocks of grouchy pitched sounds similar to the sounds of metallic objects being scraped, and a radiant solo played on a vintage electromechanical piano. These elements intertwine while they peregrinate together through a closed harmonic labyrinth interconnecting 17 microtonal heptachords, which were created by the superimposition of several musical intervals extracted from the frequency spectrum of sounds from a percussed glass bottle.

Inspired by the idea that even stars do have weather cycles, the name of this composition refers to the work of astronomers from Uppsala University in Sweden (led by Oleg Kochukhov), which observed in 2007 the motion of clouds of vaporized mercury in the atmosphere of Alpheratz (also known by the names of Alpha Andromedae, Sirrah or Delta Pegasi), a binary star located 97 light-years from Earth, the brightest star in the Andromeda constellation, visible to the naked eye as one of the vertices of the Great Square of Pegasus.

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