Vovete

Rui Guerreiro and Danny Da Silva are Vovete, an experimental indie pop band from the New York area. Friends and music-makers since 1995, both come from Portuguese families and have been invested in, and shaped by, indie music, world traditions, and experimental movements. Vovete began work on Providence with a desire to express their interests in folk, world, pop, classical, psychedelic and electronic music through songs that are minimal in design but worldly in composition, evoking hymns and myths, lullabies and long nights.

Providence takes you through an intimate world of shades and shadows, droughts and storms, love and loss. Pianos and guitars join drums, horns and strings, in patterns, points, and counterpoints. “Va La” plays a sensual melody against artful percussion and tells a lush tale about barren landscapes and struggle. The quiet supplications of “Stay Awhile” build to a crescendo of hopeful voices, and “House of Dreams” has brooding palm trees swaying to a melancholic guitar. “A Prayer for Good Voyage” builds from a lone voice into a choir of souls petitioning for remembrance while the album’s title track is an instrumental dialogue between piano and drums that transforms through patterns of dissonance and echoes.

With the help of renowned wizard of sound John Kilgore, who has worked with Steve Reich, Antony Hegarty, and Lou Reed, among others, Vovete has created an album rich in rhythms with sparse compositions and ghostly choirs. New York artist Robert Schatz lends three of his pieces for Providence. His finger-painted canvases transform powerful, graceful arabesques, full of movement, into beautiful, frightening, abstract, cartoon and completely fascinating, ominous landscapes, meant to engulf and entice you. The cover of Providence is a photograph by Australian photographer Marion Wilson that captures a rainbow bee-eater poised on a branch with wings spread, in vibrant colors, while holding a fated bee in its beak. The metaphors of life and loss are fitting for the album's incantations and prayers.

Vovete introduce Providence as their debut album, but Daniel and Rui have been playing together and in other bands for over 15 years. Together they have played in New York, Boston, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Albany, Philadelphia, Alexandria, VA, and other great cities. They have scored indie films, played at art galleries, sung in churches, orchestrated press and marketing campaigns for countless indie and major music releases in their professional lives, and played with Disney music stars (yes, that really happened, so surreal). Vovete is their newest adventure together, and their most intimate and modest one. These are songs for us. We hope you like them, too.