Curia emerged at the beginning of 2007 as a result of the joint work of Manuel Mota and Afonso Simões who had been playing together and rehearsing for some time and were going to play on the same night as Margarida Garcia and David Maranha, who were also rehearsing together, at Music Box.
However, an invitation came from Galeria ZDB to play there around the same time, and then the idea of mixing the two duos for this came up. According to Manuel Mota, “naming this quartet was a kind of commitment to more continuous and regular work, which I am excited about.”
The collective formed by Afonso Simões (drums and percussion), David Maranha (Hammond organ), Manuel Mota (wah electric guitar) and Margarida Garcia (electric guitar played with a bow) recorded their first album in 2008 for the American label Fire Museum in a limited edition of 500 copies, featuring the participation of Helena Espvall’s cello (from Espers) on one track.
This album came about from the recordings of a series of sessions that, after being chosen and edited, resulted in the music on the album. The live presentation of the debut album takes place at Cabaret Maxime in Lisbon. A second album was planned, which would be released by Tiago Miranda’s Ruby Red Records (Loosers, etc.), but which ended up coming out in 2009 on Manuel Mota’s Headlights label, in an extraordinary vinyl edition limited to 100 copies.
This second self-titled album by Curia is the result of the live recording of the show held in December 2007 at Instants Chavirés in Paris. Regarding this record, renowned British critic David Keenan had this to say: “This is free music that draws inspiration equally from the gradual projection style of Masayuki Takayanagi’s New Unity Direction, the communal Afro-futurism of the Sun Ra Arkestra, St Louis’ Black Artists Group and AACM big bands, wastoid wah heavy psychedelic freeform and the keyboard and F/X funk swamp of the late Miles Davis groups, Love Cry Want et al. Mota’s recent experiments with wah-wah have launched his solo guitar thinking into a whole new rock/jazz zone, but so far there is virtually nothing in the way of audio documentation. is an absolute beauty, with Garcia providing a monstrous backbone from which Mota shoots spurts of quicksilver electricity that explodes like fireworks all over Maranha’s gorgeous organ patterns. A fantastic release from a bunch of major thinkers who shoot holes in easy free music strategies. Highly recommended.”
Curia is a space where four musicians with long and solid careers, open to collaboration, merge their personal languages and techniques into a collective that knows no boundaries in musical exploration.
