Edonguera, Volume 1

This document is the complete text component of the Edonguera Project, a collaborative father–son musical and storytelling work in Brazilian Portuguese. It originated as an unorthodox form of musical therapy when my father, a busy legal professional, would enter trance-like states and improvise singing in an invented language. I began recording these performances and, using Logic Pro, developed techniques to tune and arrange them into composed pieces with complex, hand-written instrumentation including bass, guitars, keyboards, drums, backing vocals, and full horn sections.

To give cultural depth to this invented language, we created Edonguera: a hidden, utopian country without government or money. This idea was inspired by my study of Kandiaronk’s critique of European society, which I first encountered in The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow—a book recommended to me by my MA supervisor at the University of British Columbia, Bruce Granville Miller, with whom I have stayed in touch. Edonguera is described as an island shrouded by a veil, whose inhabitants undertake missions to help those in need in our world before returning home, leaving visitors with only dreamlike memories.

The project's website hosts essays corresponding to songs, often written in-character by fictional narrators who also appear in the stories. These texts follow Makulelu, the invented persona who sings the songs, as he communicates with animals, journeys to spiritual realms, and aids people in need. The story of "Maria de Marigadê" is one of the best examples of this mission tradition and reflects the project's literary style.

This PDF collects these essays in their original Brazilian Portuguese, interwoven with the invented-language lyrics and accompanied by illustrations. It serves as documentation of the artistic process and an invitation for readers to engage with an open-ended, collaborative, and therapeutic creative experiment. Readers can explore the full project at https://edonguera.eu/.