Cândido Lima is a veteran Portuguese composer, born in 1939 and completely cast aside from whichever mediatic spotlight there may have been in his country, even considering the common disdain for electroacoustic-contemporary-erudite composition. Not only did he study with a top-form Iannis Xenakis, but his 1979 piece ’Oceanos’, conceived to convey an experience analogous to a “calamity befalling a small room”, remains an outstanding late-modernist sonic experience.

Lima is a pioneer of countless technical and technological expressions in the Portuguese contemporary composition milieu, having accrued all sorts of opportunities and academic achievements – having interviewed Boulez and Ligeti and studied at the Sorbonne, for instance.

Among all these, ’Oceanos’, a beautiful piece filled with an inner rage that springs... from water, holds a special place on the – in various ways – very specifically abstract post-revolutionary period in Portugal, and which is now fortunately being revisited in order to better understand the historical web of Portuguese musical vanguardism over the past half-century.

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