Victor Negri - Sem

A Closer Listen

After more than a decade releasing music as Arubu Avua, Victor Negri‘s Sem opens a new chapter by removing baggage and stripping away. The title translates as “without”, and the album emerges from a period marked by grief, relocation and uncertainty, assembling recordings made across years and continents into a fragile but deeply coherent whole. Built primarily from irregular guitar loops, field recordings, feedback and electronics, Sem is an album concerned not only with loss, but with what remains afterwards.

Negri has spoken of listening almost exclusively to Loren Connors and Stars of the Lid while making the record, and their influence can be felt throughout. The music often moves at the edge of silence, allowing sounds to linger, decay and reveal their imperfections. Tracks such as “Voçoroca”, “Obrigado” and “Hinweg ists” embrace low-fi textures and ambient intrusion, transforming phone recordings, environmental noise and accidental details into emotional substance.

Yet Sem is far from monochrome. “O crux ave, spes unica” introduces a surprising melodic warmth, while “Não” pushes towards abrasion, embedding experimentation within a dense drone. “Os cacos” carries faint traces of Brazilian musical modernism, its fractured lyricism hinting at Tropicália’s legacy without ever becoming nostalgic. Throughout the album, Negri treats memory as collage: unfinished sketches, decade-old recordings and fragments from abandoned futures are carefully reassembled into something new.

For listeners familiar with the darker political landscapes of much contemporary experimental music, Sem occupies a different emotional register. It shares little with the extroverted energy of some of Negri’s earlier song-based work, yet neither does it descend into despair. Instead, it resembles an act of quiet reconstruction. The closing “Boa continuação” — literally “carry on” — ends in a haze of ambiguous sound, somewhere between electronics, water and static. It is a fitting conclusion to an album that understands grief not as an endpoint, but as a process of learning how to inhabit a changed world.

In the following interview conducted over email, Victor Negri discusses the production process for the album.

photo by Emanuele Porcinai

After more than a decade releasing music as Arubu Avua, Sem is your first album under your own name. What prompted that shift? Did the deeply personal nature of the record require a different artistic frame, or did using your own name change the way you approached the music itself?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about how, when big changes and losses happen, it’s unclear how much of the shift is a pause for recollection, a stopgap, or actually a new, more permanent reality. Is this the next chapter already? And I think the name, in this case, reflects that uncertainty for me. This choice is a bit like stating: this is me now, or so it seems, without (“sem” means “without”) a life that used to exist, and I happen to have this name. That’s all I know, and everything else is a question mark: the “without” part is clear, the “with” not so much.

But of course, if you use your own name in order to state it’s a more personal project, you may feel too exposed and then guard yourself, which may lead to less creative freedom. So the result could be a more personal project that’s somehow less honest or alive. In my case, I’m not sure I would release songs, with words and vocals, under my own name, for example. But this instrumental framework is more comfortable, at least for now.

You’ve described Sem as emerging from a period of multiple losses, relocations, and a sense of speechlessness. The album contains no vocals at all, something new in your work. At what point did you realise that words were no longer necessary—or perhaps no longer possible—and that the record had to communicate through instrumental and textural means alone?

In a way, it’s not a huge leap for me, as my song-based work does contain many instrumental tracks. This interplay or tension is something I ended up developing as a style: often, when I’m doing a longer instrumental passage, it may have developed from a song, or there may be a song coming up around the corner. So, stylistically, I think the change was about not relying on the voice and seeing how the other sounds can stand on their own, without that support.

That being said, in this case specifically, I’d say it was more of a block. I wanted words to do justice to the situation in order to be preserved forever, which felt like an impossible task. I also wanted to avoid clichés, which turned out to be difficult when going through turmoil. Also, around that time, I was listening to more instrumental music and had recently done some improvised duo concerts with a friend in Portugal. So that also informed the decision and made it easier to follow this instrumental route.

You mentioned that for months you could only listen to Stars of the Lid and Loren Connors, “the slowest possible music,” because “all words were excessive.” What was it about Loren Connors in particular that resonated with you during that period? Can traces of his approach to guitar, fragility, and silence be heard in pieces such as “Voçoroca,” “Obrigado,” or “Boa continuação”?

Loren Connors’ music, in my opinion, allows for a feeling of surrender, in that it sounds devastating but it’s so restrained, you just have to stop and listen. It can be considered ambient, but it refuses to merge into the background, it demands that you pause and enter that world. Or your own world. To me Connors’ music would be the equivalent of a poem describing very small and minute details, in order to produce an overwhelming feeling of loss.

And those details extend to the fragility you mentioned, in the playing, imperfect by traditional standards, scratchy, could fall apart any minute but never does. Plus the low fidelity recordings, the fade-ins and outs, which feel like accidentally tuning in to that world for a short while. All of that is really moving and inspiring to me. The three tracks you mentioned are examples of that inspiration, I think. They are based on acoustic guitar recordings I did with my phone, sitting outside the house in my hometown. Some of the ambience joins in, as well as the phone’s exaggerated compression and gating.

Silence—or at least the possibility of silence—feels almost like another instrument on Sem. The loops often seem suspended in place, unsure whether to continue, dissolve, or collapse into feedback. How conscious were you of leaving space within the music, and did editing become a way of sculpting absence as much as sound?

As for a conscious use of silence, there is a filtered hiss that opens and closes the album, which was originally a very low-volume recording of an empty room. When it’s amplified like that, you get the noise floor of the recorder, but at some point I thought I began to hear a voice in there. Probably there was some neighbor singing somewhere, but it was kind of eerie and made me think of EVP, trying to reach ghosts via electronics and white noise. This bit of silence made me wonder about the possibility of communicating with the dead, but at the same time I struggled to believe in that. So that’s what the silence bookending the project means to me, it’s a bit charged and ambiguous.

Apart from that, I think there’s a general low fidelity and an openness to surrounding noise. I’m usually interested in that, so it may be less conscious. But when going through grief, the surrounding noise is slightly different: it’s the sound of being present in a new world, taking it in. I know at the time I was more easily overwhelmed than usual. So there’s often a need for a breath after a new bit of information: let’s try to digest that before we move on. A lot of it is very tentative, as you said, unsure where to go next, but it’s also a way to stay with each sound for a while and watch it go.

The album is built from recordings made across many years and locations—Berlin, Porto, Lisbon, Campinas, and even phone recordings from more than a decade ago. In that sense, Sem feels both like a guitar album and a collage of memories. How did you navigate the balance between documenting the past and creating something new? Were there moments when assembling these fragments felt closer to mourning, archaeology, or reconstruction?

I guess mourning tends to pull us into the past, into what was lost, and sometimes it leads to archaeology, especially if one feels there are missing or unresolved pieces. That was the case for me. It’s a look at what used to be, but also what could have been. These previous recordings are snapshots of potential music, futures that never came to be, in places I left. I somehow gravitated toward those pieces while looking in my computer for sketches and ideas to work with, and the demos seemed fitting. There was a slight detachment in approaching them as a listener, a listener who happened to be grieving, and they made a lot of sense. So I decided to work on those kinds of tracks, to start from there.

Sometimes this archaeology can be impossible. I was dealing with the sudden death of a close family member, with whom I wish I could have been closer, and with whom I realized I have very few photographs together. So the dimension of this loss, or this presence even, is barely documented at all. There was, and still is, a sense of powerlessness, of having nothing to hold on to.

In that sense, the collage feels like assembling things that never were, plans that never came to be. At the same time — and maybe that’s the reconstruction part –, I try to look at it as some kind of affirmative landscape, or proof that things did happen, that they were real. (Gianmarco Del Re)