Kind Words for Trazar Líneas Rectas, Curvas by Eliana Rosales

The kindness comes from Avant Music News:

Trazar Líneas Rectas, Curvas is a beautiful, 41-minute set of alien soundscapes that could double as soundtrack to a psychological horror movie. But even taken on its face, the album provides unusual and yet enjoyable experimentalism.

Read the whole thing here.

And get the album here.

kind words for hearmleoþ—gieddunga by lauren redhead!

Perhaps the most striking aspects, however, are Redhead’s use of voice and vocals. There are extensive spoken-word elements, but these are not dominating, and often multiple voices mix unintelligibly in the background. Thus, aside from a few moments of text recitation, voice is used as another instrument. But when overlayed with scattered and brief acoustic motifs, as well as layers of electronics and drones, Hearmleoþ—Gieddunga takes on a character of its own. In fact, the electronic and acoustic parts often blend to the point of being indiscernible from one another.

Hearmleoþ—Gieddunga is another excellent offering from Pan y Rosas and in the running for album of the year. Well done…

read the whole review here!

kind words for transparent points on four axes by barbiero/moore/vosh!

The eight pieces on “transparent points on four axes” each began as a single layer of either a composed or improvised track to form a ground layer from which each of the participants then added additional layers. The use of this ground layer provides an underlying sense of direction as each piece’s dialog develops and unfolds. The pieces have a great deal of sonic and textural variety and the album is very well recorded and mixed. There are pieces that are driven by exceptional bass playing with lyrical use of bowed harmonics and the extreme upper register of the bass. Other pieces seem to be driven by more sensitive and nuanced percussion. The analog synth work is really interesting because it can at times give the pieces that retro analog early electronic music vibe, however I think that it really works on this album because it completely avoids the repetitive sequencer driven drivel that is currently being produced by so many contemporary musicians using analog and modular synths.

read the rest here!

kind words for oblivion by nhung nguyen!

Oblivion is a nonplace. A radio dial wandering away from the crisp enunciation of the broadcast, choosing instead to strand itself in the ambiguity of dead air. Over a fleeting 12-minutes, sound artist Nhung Nguyen avoids allegiance to anything concrete or explicitly communicative. Keyboards spiral away from any tonal centre. Voices, scrapes and gurgles arrive heavily manipulated, removed from the context that gifts them significance, bobbing like curious flotsam upon a sea of crackle and hum. Couple this with the mentions of “abandoned memories” and “lost times” in the record’s accompanying description, and the composition starts to manifest as a purgatory for forgotten experiences, occupied by sounds that have slipped through the net of remembering. It’s with masterful irony that Nguyen generates this sense of placelessness from the most grounded of source materials: found sounds, field recordings of physical spaces…

read the whole thing at: echoes and dust.

kind words for marta smilga, jelena glazova, tay_ploops, lola de la mata, nhung nguyen, anna xambó, and bella!

the extended kindness comes from closer listen. read the whole thing there!

Many labels make an effort to raise the profile of female electronic musicians, but pan y rosa discos goes all out. Of their fifteen releases so far this year, eight are by women. Their music demonstrates an incredible variety of styles and is drawn from a wide variety of countries…

When listening to the first few seconds of attractive synthesis by Latvia’s Līga Smirnova, one thinks, “oh, it’s just another club-based synth track.” But listen just a little longer, and all preconceptions will be destroyed…

Jelena Glazova may be another Latvian artist, but her approach is vastly different from that of her labelmate. Relying on heavily processed voice, Glazova creates soundscapes that flutter and pop without providing any hint of their human genesis…

The script flips again with tay_ploops (Jessica Gabriel). The Vancouver-based artist also uses voice, but her voice is recognizable throughout, delving into poetry, fragment, onomatopoeia, and all manner of stutter and loop. spool oops is a fun album, as one might expect from the title, as well as by some of Gabriel’s other careers (puppeteer, clown)…

Shifting gears once again, we encounter the work of London’s Lola de la Mata, an impossible to categorize artist whose work demonstrates incredible intelligence and complexity. de la Mata’s main interest is the kinesthetic nature of the body in relation to movement and sound. Her work has often been used in dance performances, as the nuances of her compositions lend themselves well to creative interpretations. In Remise en Bouche (Palate Cleanser), one can hear percussive breath and snapshots of song, along with static and feedback, trains and bells, violin and voice…

Vietnam’s Nhung Nguyen (Sound Awakener) offers an intriguing combination of static and chime on the 12-minute single piece Oblivion. The drone influence is apparent along with the “drifting, falling” feel of ambience, justifying the description of the work as “calm, meditative, chaotic and noisy.” While listening, one feels the tug between peace and activity, retreat and forward surge, work and play, regret and letting go…

Those listening to these releases in order may flinch when they reach Anna Xambó‘s H2RI, a collection of twenty one-minute tracks rife with feedback and noise. The album would make a great alarm clock. But there is also pattern in noise: frequency, repetition, dynamic contrast, give-and-take…

The latest label release comes from Brazilian artist Bella, and captures a live half-hour performance inspired by water and light. The piece, titled UN, is as dark as the unmapped fathoms, where furtive movement is often imperceptible and creatures create their own illumination. One can imagine this piece filling the performance space with reverberation, sound waves bouncing off walls and traveling through bodies…

kind words for the malady of death by jelena glazova

avant music news:

Sparse waves of distortion overlap to create constructive interference in the form of beats. These oscillations combine in pairs or triads. The elements mainly explore the lower-registers, often hovering in a frequency range that is easy to overlook. At times, these sounds resemble adverse weather patterns (e.g., thunder and lightning) or extra-planetary noises, which are in line with the overall emotional tone of the album.

kind words for luna anfibia by lucía chamorro!

At times during Luna Anfibia, Lucía Chamorro reverse-engineers the process of composition. Instead of shaping the sounds themselves, there is a sense of tinkering with the mind and ears used to receive them: clogging the ear canals with water so that guitar loops and birdsong arrive muffled, goading the listener toward a conspiratorial paranoia that hears symbiotic collusion between the sound of chewing and the tinkle of chimes, a rupturing of stereo perception that places radio broadcasts at the left and right simultaneously. I don’t know how she manages this switch in emphasis. Perhaps it’s the way she forces me to wrestle with the familiar, tampering with everyday sound (running water, open-mouthed chewing, tapped kitchen ceramics) to create a certain shortcoming in my powers of recognition. These compositions almost resemble memories from my own day-to-day experiences, but not quite. Something is off. The lights are dimmer. The walls bend slightly. In a bid to protect those sounds that pad the perimeter of my life with the comfort of familiar sensations, I turn inward for answers instead. What am I doing differently to dislodge this experience of the commonplace…

follow the link to read the rest.

the kindness comes from attn: magazine.