Sentinelas is the first album release on Rudimentary Records. Produced and conceived by Irish producer Mick “T-Woc” Donohoe the album is the result of a trip Donohoe took to Brazil in 2014. Built off samples from records bought in a dusty Sao Paulo warehouse, Sentinelas is the unintentional soundtrack to a 1970s Brazilian educational comic book, fusing together hip-hop, electronic music, and dub to tell a strange-but-true story of discovery, antibodies, and cockroach shit dust.
Mistakes and accidents are the lifeblood of creativity. In 2014, Donohoe visited a recently opened warehouse in Sao Paulo nicknamed the Feira de Uma Milhao LPs (the Million LP Fair) — appropriate as the place was filled to the brim with records. Together with a friend, Donohoe began a five-day trawl through 7” records looking for gold beneath the dust. As they packed up to leave Donohoe spotted “a quirky, colorful little comic” and stashed a couple copies among his finds. Back at home, Donohoe found the comics while cleaning and listening to the records for samples. Unable to read Portuguese he imagined its tale as that of a little girl, Tereza, on a space adventure where she encountered robots and aliens. The comics came with their own record, which was missing, and so the idea became to use the vinyl stash to recreate the soundtrack to Tereza’s adventure. That’s when Donohoe coughed up a bit of cockroach shit dust.
The album was created using records, analogue synthesizers and FX, and an existing trove of drums and field recordings. The production process began with the samples from Brazil but as new layers of sound were added these receded in the back of the compositions, becoming a spiritual source rather than defining element. True to its soundtrack intent, the album shifts in moods as it progresses: energetic, calm, epic, disturbing, reflective. Each track details an imagined scene of Tereza’s daring adventure using the universal language of music. Mixed on a Harrison console, created for film and TV work, As Sentinelas is a warm ode to record digging and childhood imagination.
As for how the story ends, it turns out Tereza was never on a space adventure. She was traveling through the body and the colorful sentinelas were antibodies defending her against the invasion of evil looking foreign germs. Cockroach shit dust.
