It’s as though Rosalind Hall is wielding a hand-held fan, pressing it against surfaces so that it buzzes in frictional complaint, without applying the necessary pressure to stop the blades entirely. It’s a delicate navigation of brinks and almosts – her saxophone lingers upon single notes and tilts them, ever so slowly, until they threaten to fall over. Her instrument throbs uneasily as overtones force their way into the frame, turning ovular drops of pure tone into snarls of dissonance. It’s an agonising sonic yoga routine; pitches bend into awkward poses and then hold them for as long as concentration, exhalation and muscle power will permit, the note wobbling like calves and biceps in convulsions of tension. Collapse is always a mere false step away.
Tag: review
kind words for stanze by palimpsest trio!
AMN Reviews: Palimpsest Trio – Stanze [pyr168]; Orrù Mar Rocha – Live at MIA 2015 [Endtitles ET2] « Avant Music News
Source: AMN Reviews: Palimpsest Trio – Stanze [pyr168]; Orrù Mar Rocha – Live at MIA 2015 [Endtitles ET2] « Avant Music News
kind words for breathing through wires by iris garrelfs
kind words for nununu by clara de asís and less than human by cp!
Nununu is Marseille-based experimental guitarist Clara de Asís’s twenty-four minute, unedited single-take improvisation for prepared electric guitar. A continuously evolving soundscape, the piece begins with a low-key electronic hum or murmur that at times sounds like the rush of wind through telephone wires or the throbbing of airplane propellers high overhead. From there de Asís builds reverberant sound blocks into a thickness of layered echoes which eventually converge into a buzz and an unsettling, suspended chord punctuated by the metallic chiming of struck strings.
CP, whose 2013 release Rim explored the sonic products of generative compositional processes, here presents five pieces that begin with minimal musical materials which accumulate into larger structures through repetition, superimposition and variation. In Being States CP creates changing harmonic patterns by layering a handful of brief motifs of a few notes each; the larger melodic aggregates that result take on unpredictable shapes by virtue of the differing lengths and cycles of the constituent motifs. Plantlife and A Moth Is Born are made up of somewhat harsher sounds, the former sending its elongated tones riding out on a wave of static and the latter consisting of siren-like, dissonant glissandi. Fractured Barnacles is constructed around a pulsing sequence of changeable speed, while Gldufgsld closes the collection with a floating, consonant chord.
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kind words for less than human by cp!
kind words for less than human by cp!
“On third play I opened a window (analog window). If your current climate allows, this is also recommended. Because though obviously synthesized, even the mild airport melodies of “being states” and the tiny digital pops and pricklings peppered here and there are so organically arranged in time that they meld flawlessly with the natural ambience. So patient in its movements you might mistake the audio for the whisper of many moving insects, or tiny rain. For me I could not differentiate between the sound in my room and the sound of people cutting down trees down the street, and the breaking of that border was quite nice.”
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kind words for less than human by cp!
[“Being States”] is perhaps the album’s most ambitious, a gentle melody refracted through subtle, pinging percussion. As for “Gldufglsd,” the album’s longest cut, at over 11 minutes, it is, like “Plantlife,” structured around a low-level drone, heard here below a harsh shimmer, out of which slowly arises a warmer tone whose sense of comfort is balanced by the increased threat of that buzzsaw shimmer. It seems to suggest a sequel to “A Moth Is Born,” in which the promise of a heat brings the end.
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kind words for palimpsest by adriano orrù!
kind words for palimpsest by adriano orrù, paulo chagas, silvia corda, and mauro sambo!
Ne esce un lavoro composto unicamente da duetti, col basso che si accompagna di volta in volta alle percussioni e all’elettronica di Mauro Sambo, al piano di Silvia Corda e agli strumenti a fiato di Paulo Chagas, conferendo al lavoro una certa varietà stilistica, unificata però da un mood sempre piuttosto pacato. Il disco funziona bene sia che si segua la scaletta, che alterna le tracce delle varie coppie, sia che si scelga di ascoltare di fila tutti i contributi di un determinato duo, visto che la varietà di cui si parlava è riscontrabile anche all’interno dei singoli duetti e raramente un ospite usa due volte lo stesso strumento. Nei tre pezzi in compagnia di Sambo, ad esempio, troviamo campane tibetane, gong, marimba e percussioni orientali, che caratterizzano ogni traccia e portano il basso a suonare in modo sempre diverso: Palimpsest è un blues ambientale intessuto di suoni spettrali, Life Of A Duet un brano più classicamente impro, fra brevi fughe e momenti d’intesa, mentre in Scrape Off Orrù duetta con il suo doppio campionato in un brano teso, impreziosito sul finale dalla marimba. Tre anche i pezzi con Silvia Corda che, portando in dote un piano preparato e uno giocattolo, per qualche strana alchimia fa ritrovare al basso una corposità quasi rock, evidente nella pulsante The Rain Tree Under The Rain, uno dei brani più riusciti dell’intero CD. Infine i quattro duetti coi fiati di Chagas – clarinetto basso, sax soprano e flauto – che ci portano in territori prossimi al jazz, dove il basso gioca con la melodia portante stiracchiandosi e contraendosi (Bortadie) o trova l’intesa su coordinate free, dopo aver seguito il flauto in atmosfere orientaleggianti (On Different Shores). Un album decisamente riuscito, che parte da un’idea originale e ben congegnata e la sviluppa in piena libertà, senza risentire dell’eterogeneità della formula con cui è assemblato, ma facendone anzi un punto di forza.
Il disco, oltre che acquistabile in formato fisico, è scaricabile gratuitamente dal sito dell’etichetta.
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kind words for rub by auris + gino!
kind words for nununu by clara de asís!
kind words for nununu by clara de asís from the modern folk music of america.
recorded in a home studio in france ‘with no interventions’ other than panning the left and right channels, it is a spatial listening experience and the artist recommends using good stereo reproduction equipment. after listening to it, i’d say it’s worth it to sit down with it and plug it in to your system if you have the chance!
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