In VENTVRIS VENTIS, Torres de Mello departs from the kaleidoscopic futurism of Prezepeiro and plunges into a stark emotional chamber—a sound-world sculpted more by psychological weather than narrative fable. If Prezepeiro was a mythographic opera veiled in folklore and language-play, VENTVRIS VENTIS is its inverse: an internal monologue in ruins, a document of affective erosion told not through character but through fracture. The protagonist here is no longer a traveler between utopian municipalities, but someone trapped in the recursive logic of loss. This is an album about weathering the unweatherable.
Structurally, the album resists climax. There’s no ascending arc or resolving gesture. Instead, VENTVRIS VENTIS turns inward, spiraling. The songs hover on a knife-edge between confession and evasion—phrases blur, repeat, crumble. Traditional form gives way to foggy architectures of refrain, echo, and omission. Torres’s technique here is refusal: refusal of harmonic certainty, refusal of closure, refusal of rhetorical neatness. He lets each track dissolve into the next, like breaths exhaled but never fully released.
This is not to say the album is static. On the contrary—it’s charged. But the charge is subterranean. Tension accumulates through subtle melodic recursion, dissonant cadences that imply but do not resolve, and lyrics that read like diary entries caught mid-thought. There’s a poetic compression in the syntax, a learned economy of heartbreak. Dissonance becomes the harmonic language of truth.
Lyrically, the album retains his signature style: elliptical, impressionistic, often working through broken grammar and phonetic instinct rather than strict semantic clarity. Sentences begin and do not end; images flicker rather than land. But here, unlike in Prezepeiro, there is less abstraction and more intimacy. While his previous work manipulated language to fictionalize reality, VENTVRIS VENTIS manipulates language to feel reality more nakedly. The Portuguese becomes wet with regret, desire, accusation. His words act less as symbols and more as residues of presence—as if recorded not to be understood, but to be felt under the skin.
What stands out is the strategic use of repetition—not as chorus, but as mantra, echo, or obsession. Lines return altered, like memories misremembered. This refusal to move on mirrors the album’s thematic core: luto, limerência, maldição—each not just a word but a room in which the speaker remains locked.
Thematically, this is a record of aftermath. If Prezepeiro dreamed of a folkloric future, VENTVRIS VENTIS confronts what’s left when the dream has died. What remains is not clarity, but sediment: longing without object, desire without resolution, anger that folds back into self-questioning. He writes not about people, but about their imprints. Not about relationships, but about their hauntings.
Torres de Mello is never literal. The "you" across the album is a shapeshifter—sometimes a lover, sometimes a ghost, sometimes the self. That fluidity is crucial. Emotion here is not directed—it radiates. The listener must follow not the narrative, but the mood, the aftertaste of grief clinging to the edges of the voice.
What makes VENTVRIS VENTIS distinct in his body of work is its unflinching vulnerability. This is a ruin-poem set to music, not polished but decayed—deliberately so. The album feels unfinished, not because it lacks, but because it refuses finality. The “ventis” (winds) in the title are not directional—they are dispersive. They scatter memory, unravel structure, erode certainty. And in that erosion, his voice as composer becomes more intimate than ever before.
Where Prezepeiro was concerned with invention, VENTVRIS VENTIS is concerned with survival. And that survival is not triumphant—it is honest, quiet, at times painful, always human.
Staff
Produced Mixed and Mastered by Alexandre Melo de Albuquerque - Invited artist
Rafael Durand: Electric Drums on Lamentar - cover
cover: Alexandre Melo de Albuquerque
photography: Alex Santa Rita
visual design: Espira -
all compositions by Alexandre Melo de Albuquerque
