Marla Hlady & Christof Migone’s “On And On And Off” reviewed by Blow Up
Diogo Alvim’s ”Música para Mysterious Heart” reviewed by Music Map
”Música para Mysterious Heart”, uscito per Crónica Records, è un lavoro creato per un’esibizione di danza della coreografa Tânia Carvalho, che si muove in una dimensione sospesa, intima e quasi cinematografica, confermando Diogo Alvim come un artista capace di trasformare emozioni sottili in paesaggi sonori evocativi.
Il disco si presenta come un percorso interiore, più che una semplice raccolta di brani: un viaggio delicato tra malinconia, contemplazione e piccoli lampi di luce. Fin dalle prime tracce si percepisce una forte impronta ambient e neoclassica, costruita su pianoforte minimale, texture elettroniche leggere e arrangiamenti essenziali.
Alvim evita volutamente ogni eccesso: le sue composizioni respirano, lasciano spazio al silenzio e invitano all’ascolto attento. Questo approccio conferisce al disco un carattere profondamente meditativo. Le melodie sono semplici ma mai banali. Spesso si sviluppano lentamente, come se emergessero da uno stato di sogno.
Le progressioni armoniche tendono a essere circolari, rafforzando la sensazione di introspezione e di sospensione temporale. Il titolo stesso, ”Mysterious Heart”, suggerisce un filo narrativo emotivo più che concettuale. L’album non segue una struttura lineare, ma alterna momenti di maggiore intensità a passaggi quasi eterei.
Questo equilibrio lo rende adatto sia a un ascolto concentrato sia come colonna sonora per momenti di riflessione. Ogni brano sembra rappresentare una sfaccettatura diversa dell’interiorità: nostalgia, vulnerabilità, quiete. Non c’è mai dramma esplicito, piuttosto una malinconia trattenuta che permea l’intero lavoro.
C’è nel disco una grande coerenza sonora: l’album mantiene una linea stilistica chiara e riconoscibile. Notevole è anche la sensibilità compositiva: Alvim mostra un grande controllo dell’emozione, evitando cliché melodici. Inoltre, rimarchevole è pure la capacità evocativa: la musica suggerisce immagini e stati d’animo con naturalezza, senza bisogno di parole.
Proprio la scelta minimalista, se da un lato è il punto di forza principale, dall’altro potrebbe risultare eccessivamente uniforme per alcuni ascoltatori. Chi cerca dinamiche marcate o sviluppi più articolati potrebbe percepire il disco come troppo rarefatto. Sarebbe un peccato, alla luce del grande valore dell’opera.
”Música para Mysterious Heart” è un album che non chiede attenzione immediata, ma la conquista lentamente. È una musica che si insinua, che lavora in profondità e che trova la sua dimensione ideale in un ascolto solitario e raccolto, grazie anche agli interventi vocali della grande Tânia Carvalho, l’artista portoghese che da oltre 20 anni è un’eccellenza come coreografa oltre che nella musica, il disegno ed il cinema.
Diogo Alvim firma un lavoro elegante e sincero, capace di parlare a chi è disposto a fermarsi e ad ascoltare davvero. Un disco consigliato agli amanti del pianoforte contemporaneo, dell’ambient e delle atmosfere introspettive. (Andrea Rossi)
via Music Map
Machinefabriek’s “Spelonk” reviewed by Gonzo Circus
Durán Vázquez + Kloob’s “Vinum Sabbati: In the Dawn of Science Fiction” reviewed by Nitestylez
Released on November 11th, 2k25 via the ever active Portuguese label that is known under the name of Cronica is “Vinum Sabbati: At The Dawn Of Science Fiction”, the first full length collaboration album conceived by Duran Vazquez and Kloob which had known eachother for almost a quarter of a century before actually starting to work on a shared musical project. Over the course of 58 minutes and a total of eight pieces the two artists built a sonic universe strongly influenced by the proto science fiction of Arthur Machen’s short story “Novel Of The White Powder”, opening with what can be described as a well unsettling maelstrom of unease named “Prelude To Dreadful Confessions By A Doctor”, a spiralling stream of Cold Ambient x Death Ambient hostile and cold like the interstellar void subsequently followed by “A Premonition Of Self-Inflicted Harm” which presents a calmer, more droning and certainly more spatial take on slowly morphing Dark Ambient backed by futuristic bleeps hidden deep within the mix. With the “Ambience Of Suspicion” the duo enters a realm of deep melancholia built up over the course of eons before “The Devil’s Pharmacy” brings forth eerie deep space claustrophobia and vantablack atmospheres in combination with metallic clangings, ever morphing echoes of alien communication and rumbling low end movements whereas “The Rotten Limb” further explores icy exoterrestrial landscapes and their wafting mists out of which ghostly, fluttering and angelic choirs emerge, covered and interrupted by ever intensifying sirens. Furthermore we see “Ominous Remedy – Transcending Human Condition” presenting an almost classic approach to rather melodic sci-fi Ambient comprised of widescreen atmospheres and a backbone of harmonic, intermodulating pulses before drifting off into score’esque soundspheres and, later on, abrasive all annihilating Noize whilst “Confinement And Mortification” embodies a feel of neverending hollow nothingness, once again sitting on the brink of mind-numbing Death Ambient, and the concluding cut aptly titled “Scientific Horror” rounds things off in a surprisingly calm and shimmering Ambient manner, providing a glimpse of hope at the horizon after a trip through eternal darkness. Highly recommended, yet one album not to play to the mentally or emotionally unstable as its sonic contents might have disturbing or disorienting effects. BAZE.DJUNKIII
via Nitestylez
Diogo Alvim’s ”Música para Mysterious Heart” reviewed by Il Manifesto
Matilde Meireles’s “Four Tales” reviewed by A Cabine
A artista sonora Matilde Meireles regressou à Crónica no passado dia 10 de março para lançar o seu novo álbum, “Four Tales”. O disco é fruto de uma performance ao vivo e está, como não poderia deixar de ser, repleto de field recordings trabalhados ao longo de mais de 1h.
O álbum articula som e arquitetura numa “conversa que expande os sentidos”, explorando cidade e água como “entidades interligadas”, escreve-se nas notas oficiais. O álbum, com três faixas a solo e uma colaborativa, resulta do projeto DRIFT, um pavilhão flutuante concebido como instrumento e espaço público em Belfast em 2024.
“Matilde Meireles é uma artista sonora e investigadora que recorre a field recordings para compor projetos que partem de cada local”, pode ler-se na biografia oficial – aliás, algo que pudemos comprovar no OUT.FEST 2025. “De carácter profundamente exploratório, combinando improvisação e outros fluxos sonoros com múltiplas abordagens de gravação, o seu trabalho concretiza-se através de atuações ao vivo, instalações, lançamentos de álbuns, projetos comunitários, workshops e publicações tanto académicas como criativas.”
Tal qual “Four Tales”, os trabalhos partem então dessa investigação e recolha nos sítios. “Sunnyside” (2020), por exemplo, baseia-se em gravações feitas em Belfast, cidade irlandesa onde a portuguesa fez doutoramento no Sonic Arts Research Center, na Queens University. Com um percurso que passa pelo OSSO Colectivo ou a investigação, Matilde Meireles tem muito mais para mostrar, como é caso dos outros trabalhos editados pela portuense Crónica.
Encontra “Four Tales” no Bandcamp. Há versão física (CD) disponível. Daniel Duque.
via A Cabine
Machinefabriek’s “Spelonk” reviewed by Neue Musikzeitung
Eine kleine EP mit drei Tracks elektronischer Computer-Musik (6, 17 und 18 Minuten). Wenn man nicht wüsste, dass diese Kompositionen erst kürzlich realisiert worden sind, dürfte man Schwierigkeiten haben, dies zu erraten. Natürlich ist da die Klarheit der modernen Aufnahmetechnik zu merken, die ganz wunderbar die Klangideen im akustischen Raum staffelt. Also da die Dauertöne, dort die Impulsklänge, das Angerauschte und das spektakulär Präzise wie in Spelonk I.
via HörBar
Matilde Meireles’s “Four Tales” reviewed by Research Music
The trickling, bubbling, and gurgling movements of water bodies have been a recurring motif for as long as ambient music and field recordings have existed. Yet, UK-based Portuguese artist Matilde Meireles has a gift for reshaping the known into the unexpected. Based on DRIFT, a site-specific floating pavilion created as part of the Belfast 2024 cultural programme, Four Tales showcases Meireles’s brilliant sense of sonic architecture. Field recordings ripple gently over abstract electronics, like a shallow stream over rocks. The patter of rain and the droning nocturnal calls of nearby wildlife emerge into urban traffic. The flow sounds so pristine, so untamed that it suggests an absence of anthropogenic influence, highlighting the disquieting nature of the live performance and improvisation on percussion (Michael Speers, Conor McAuley) and tromba marina (Paul Stapleton) that haunt the album’s closing section.
via Research Music
New release: Diogo Alvim’s ”Música para Mysterious Heart”
Mysterious Heart is a dance piece by choreographer Tânia Carvalho, created for Tanzmainz at the Staatstheater Mainz in 2023–24.
The music composed for this project was conceived from the outset with a certain autonomy from the choreography. The initial idea, taken from a practice already familiar in Tânia’s choreographic work, involved exploring and characterising different emotions or states of mind — a kind of sonic catalogue of affects that would later support the choreographic composition.
With this in mind, I proposed working with the drawings of Charles Le Brun, published in his treatise Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698). These drawings, which examine the particularities of facial expressions associated with different human emotions, stem from Descartes’s Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) and became a kind of visual grammar for many later creations. At the same time, in much of her work — both in drawing and in choreography — Tânia has developed her own vocabulary of facial expressions, which created an immediate affinity with Le Brun’s universe.
The first step was to select a group of emotions and their corresponding drawings, and to record vocal improvisations by Tânia exploring each affect. The only exception was “Envy”, which does not appear in Le Brun’s catalogue; for this we used the figure de la jalousie naist l’aversion. With no stimulus other than the “passion” and its drawing, the recordings were made without any instrumental accompaniment or sonic support.
These recordings became the initial material for the electroacoustic composition. The vocal material was selected, then edited or transformed, and integrated into a new structure that explored different sonic atmospheres and characters for each emotional state. Each short piece was later explored, adjusted and adapted during the choreographic creation process, testing its relationship with the dancers’ movements.
Two pieces that were not used in the final performance (“Envy” and “Fear”) are presented here for the first time as independent tracks (11 and 12). Some of their sonic material was nonetheless included in “Pictures” (track 3), which runs through the entire “catalogue” of emotions in a sequence that also includes material not used elsewhere. In addition, a longer version of the piece “Sadness” is included.
“Hope” is based on John Blow’s “Morlake Ground” (1689), as well as excerpts from “Triumph, Victorious Love” from Henry Purcell’s opera Dioclesian (1690).
Alongside this small catalogue of “passions”, other pieces were developed according to different criteria, responding to a structure that emerged from the choreographic process. “All the thoughts in the world at the same time” (tracks 2 and 8) stands apart from the rest, both choreographically and sonically. From the beginning, these pieces were shaped as dense layers of different sonic textures in constant transformation. The title, given by Tânia, became an early guide for the sonic composition. Finally, “Overture”, “Interlude” and “Finale” (tracks 1, 5 and 10) also diverge from the sonic vocabulary of the other pieces, helping articulate the overall form.
All pieces in this album were revisited at the mixing stage and newly mastered for this edition.
Música para Mysterious Heart is now available as a limited-release CD or download.
Matilde Meireles’s “Four Tales” reviewed by Rockerilla
