Alfredo Costa Monteiro is a sound artist, sound poet, improviser and composer, born in Porto, Portugal, in 1964. He's been living and working in Barcelona since 1992, the year he graduated in sculpture / multimedia at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His installations and sound pieces, all of a lo-fi character, have in common an interest for unstable processes, raw materials and conceptual constrictions, often with a disconcerting simplicity but with a strong phenomenological aspect. He has been working for more than 20 years in various projects of improvised and experimental music, using each time a different instrumentation such as prepared accordion, prepared guitar, turntable, various electroacoustic devices or resonant objects, in order to give these projects multiple identities and directions. In sound poetry, his work focuses on the musicality of language pushed to the limit of its phonetic entrenchments, evicting semantics for the benefit of sound. His performances, built of snatches of conversation, are often noisy and polyglot: he uses portuguese, french, spanish, catalan and english to create multiple meanings that often defy understanding and lead to confusion. He has collaborated with many musicians, choreographers, video artists, and filmmakers and has shown his work throughout Europe, Canada, the US, Russia and Japan. He has an extensive discography on labels from all around the world, in solo and in different formations. www.costamonteiro.net