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Laraaji @ MADEIRADiG

Edward Larry Gordon aka Laraaji was born in Philadelphia and started by studying piano, trombone and vocals. The street performances that are his work only came up later, during the 70s, in Park Slope in Brooklyn, Village and Upper West Side. “Village was my favourite space, but presently is less ‘hippiefied’ and more ‘gentrified’, as New York in general, as a matter of fact. I no longer see the experimental street performances I used to see back when I did them”. It was at that time that Brian Eno discovered him, on one of the nights he was playing at the Washington Square Park, inviting him then to record an album for his inspiring environmental series Ambient 3: Day of Radiance.

Laraaji has a fascinating life style, and yoga is a part of it since the 70s, when he started to explore meditation and experience “a deep feeling of inner peace. I sat down for hours, starting with a deep breath at the same time erasing all the titles, names, and classifications of my being, until I reached a state of peace and quiet, which had an important impact in my music and creativity”. He decided meditation would be the pillar of his life and thus a new style of music emerged based in improvisation and inner meditation “That period took me to explore an electric zither, a portable instrument, very easy to play outdoors, and that lead me to create what I call groovie or free flow music”.

See also: MADEIRADig 2017

She was born in 1976 and has been a journalist since 1994. She has taken several journalism courses at CENJOR (Protocol Center for Professional Training for Journalists) and several courses in contemporary art, the latter being the Postgraduate Course in Curatorship at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities University of Lisbon. She is a founding member and director of the magazine Umbigo with which he developed a curatorial project. Jury and curator of the Contemporary Jewelery exhibition "On the Other Hand", commemorating the 5th anniversary of the PIN (Portuguese Contemporary Jewelery Association). Also for the magazine Umbigo made the edition of the book "Coordinates of the Body in the Contemporary Art", a collection that reunites a series of artistic works being that many of them were developed purposely for the same; in a set of works that represent a small sample of the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of a group of artists.

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