Thomas Rohrer & Abdul Moimême Outras Margens

Swiss rabequista Thomas Rohrer and Portuguese guitarist Abdul Moimême first met in 2014 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, during the first major meeting of Brazilian and Portuguese musicians, critics, and researchers promoted by the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Each was already a committed individualist, play ing a distinctive instrument in a unique way, but both realized that their distinc tive paths could be mutually supportive. In the following decade they would frequently meet in Lisbon as Rohrer passed through, en route to Brazil.

The rabeca is a folk variant of the violin that passed from Islamic cultures to Portu gal to Brazil, where it was further devel oped by numerous luthiers. Thomas Rohrer enjoyed an extended collabora tion with the late Nelson da Rabeca, a luthier named for the instrument, and his wife Benedita dos Santos. With Rohrer, the instrument takes on a new life with varied preparations. He uses the strings and body of the rabeca to amplify small objects, whether by fric tion or beating: a mini whisk, saxophone reeds, an egg slicer, wooden sticks and pieces of rubber. He also sings into theinstrument, animating flat stones or seed shells on the rabeca’s top.

Abdul Moimême’s rig, too, has a rich and highly personal foundation, including a guitar he built as a teenager in the 1970s, here played flat, as is its table-top com panion, a guitar in the baritone range fabricated from Moimême’s detailed drawings. Their sounds are extended with physical preparation and electron ics, including pedals and e-bows, the meta-guitarist standing over them.

We wander here in an unknown landscape, but with each episode, a new orchestra, a new world, comes into being, discoveries of centuries mysteriously shifted, echoing the magic realism and creative subver sion encountered in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Colombia in One Hundred Years of Solitude , Alejo Carpentier’s Haiti in Kingdom of this World or Laurent Binet’s transformation of Colombus’s expedition in Civilizations , ultimately resulting in the Aztec conquest of Europe. In the music of Rohrer and Moimême, such transformations take place in sound, the pieces suggesting anything that might be struck, scraped or plucked; anything that might be born, blown or thrown, recorded without edits or over dubs. Outras Margens , “other shores”.

The opening Garatuja (“scribble”) may be particularly well-named. The sounds include small electric motors, possibly inferring in sound the wayward circling of a child’s ancient mechanical drawing instrument called “Etch A Sketch”. Everything is movement, the occasional appearance of strings amid the percus sion almost incidental.

Travessia (“crossing”) will suggest the ratcheting sound of a güiro , a South American per cussion instrument played by scraping carved wooden ridges. There are later hints of tin can percussion, as well as strange string scrapes, the echoing bell sounds of children’s toys, a small cane flute, a low turbine and hints of small creatures traversing landscapes. There might be hints of a crossing of the Styx, here, however, a river sufficiently variable to suggest playground or doom.

The individual lines of Oco (“hollow”) sometimes match the continuous sound of bowed, blown or mechanical instruments, along with lightly plucked strings. There’s also the dream of the workshop, lathes and band saws amid strangely mutated voices and incidental wandering tones. Sounds become alien, animal or siren, whirring into an electric hive.

Outras Margens , the last heard track, begins in a delicate hive of electronic bells, the source another mystery. Gradually scraps of melody arise as a new world—continuous, resonant, a kind of artificial Bali with ghosts of gamelan resonance lingering, expanding, then sheltering amidst exalted shuffling and scraping, perhaps a cargo being unloaded, here almost a delicate scream in this daydream. The gamelan tones rise again, then glass windchimes, the set is being pushed into view, the heavy lifting its own Cagean silence, the calm continuum its own setting, clouds drift nearer, each with multiple messages.

This music embodies myth, its instruments and songs developing their own echoing legends, its Orphic identities reverber ating, penetrating, into the fabric of our world.

Stuart Broomer, May 2026