We are delighted to announce the second release by Jérôme Noetinger in Crónica, this time in a collaboration with Christian Malfray, aka Les Persécutions de Strasbourg.
Malfray manipulates filters and oscillators within a carefully arranged feedback loop to make various resonators ring out and sing. Noetinger plays recordings, Revox, CDJ and modular synthesiser, channelling also the sound through a variety of resonant objects. They met in August 2025 in Rives to record a few hours of improvisation, of which this is a more or less re-edited excerpt. Together, they had already produced the album J’entends pas de musique, based on a shared listening project at the Saint-Etienne Hospital in 2021, as well as No Undo, a project initiated by Plusmoins at the Le Corbusier site in Firminy.
Nur wenige Wochen nach Christof Migones Soloalbum “OO” (Squint Press) erscheint mit “On And On And Off” die neue Zusammenarbeit des kanadischen Klangkünstlers mit Marla Hlady als CD auf Crónica. Ausgangspunkt des Projekts sind Aufnahmen eines zwölfköpfigen Chors aus Mitarbeiter des ORF, die ihren täglichen Weg zwischen Arbeit und Zuhause in Form von Klangexperimenten, Stimmen, Geräuschen und Beobachtungen dokumentierten.
Aus diesem Material formen Hlady und Migone laut Label eine vielschichtige Komposition über Mobilität, Routinen und die oft unsichtbaren Rhythmen des Alltags. Zwischen Field Recordings, Sprache, Soundcollage und konzeptueller Klangkunst entsteht, wie es weiter heißt, ein ebenso verspieltes wie nachdenkliches Hörstück über Pendelbewegungen, Arbeitswelten und das Leben im Transit. “On And On And Off” ist auch zum Download erhältlich.
On And On And Off to wspólny projekt Marli Hlady i Christofa Migone’a, rozwijany od 2015 roku. Artyści, działający od lat osobno w obszarach dźwięku, performansu i instalacji, w swoich wspólnych realizacjach łączą indywidualne zainteresowania w pracach skupionych na miejscu, przestrzeni dźwiękowej i codziennym doświadczeniu ruchu.
Punktem wyjścia dla On And On And Off stał się chóralny projekt zbudowany wokół 12 podpowiedzi, które każdy z uczestników mógł zinterpretować po swojemu. Głównym tematem były dojazdy między domem a pracą – nie tylko jako fizyczny rytm przemieszczania się, lecz także jako doświadczenie słuchowe, emocjonalne i mentalne. Artyści zachęcali uczestników, by podczas podróży nie tylko słuchać, ale też rejestrować otaczający ich dźwiękowy krajobraz, oddawać głosem to, co słyszą, i reagować na własne doświadczenie ruchu.
Projekt wychodzi od pozornie zwyczajnych sytuacji – korków, codziennych tras, przejścia z sypialni do domowego biura – i traktuje je jako zapis szerszych napięć między życiem a pracą, ruchem i zatrzymaniem, celem i powtarzalnością. Z zebranych nagrań Hlady i Migone wydobywają ukryte rytmy, które organizują codzienność i prowadzą nas nie tylko do pracy czy domu, ale też w stronę nieustannego, powtarzalnego obiegu.
Marla Hlady i Christof Migone prezentowali swoje prace m.in. w Ftarri w Tokio, Experimental Intermedia w Nowym Jorku, Arraymusic i Electric Perfume w Toronto, a także w ArKO Museum w Seulu, Errant Bodies w Berlinie, Glenfiddich Gallery w Szkocji, Produit Rien w Montrealu i Christie Contemporary w Toronto. Oboje są związani z uczelniami wyższymi w Kanadzie – Hlady wykłada na University of Toronto, a Migone na University of Western Ontario. Artur Mieczkowski
Emotions are notoriously difficult things to catalogue. Philosophers have tried. Psychologists have tried. Entire self-help industries have built glittering empires around the idea that feelings can be identified, labelled, managed, and filed away like documents in a cabinet. Human beings, meanwhile, continue to cry during advertisements, fall in love with unsuitable people, and experience jealousy because someone else’s holiday photographs received more likes. The emotions remain stubbornly resistant to organization.
Diogo Alvim’s “Música Para Mysterious Heart” approaches this problem from a far more interesting angle. Originally composed for choreographer T’nia Carvalho’s dance production “Mysterious Heart”, the album begins with the idea of constructing a sonic catalogue of affects, a collection of emotional states translated into sound. Yet rather than reducing feelings to neat categories, Alvim reveals just how slippery and elusive they really are.
The conceptual foundation is fascinating. Drawing inspiration from Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century treatise “Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions”, itself influenced by René Descartes’ investigations into human emotions, Alvim and Carvalho built the project around a series of recorded vocal improvisations. Presented only with visual representations of specific emotional states, Carvalho responded through voice alone. Those recordings subsequently became the raw material from which Alvim crafted these electroacoustic compositions.
What emerges is neither soundtrack nor sound art in the conventional sense. Instead, “Música Para Mysterious Heart” occupies an intriguing territory between theatre, composition, psychoacoustic experiment, and emotional archaeology. It feels less like listening to music about emotions than overhearing emotions before they have fully become language.
Alvim is no stranger to interdisciplinary work. The Portuguese composer has developed a body of work that frequently engages with theatre, dance, and electroacoustic practices, displaying a keen sensitivity to the ways sound interacts with movement, space, and perception. That experience proves crucial here. Even separated from its choreographic origins, the album retains a strong sense of physicality. One can almost feel bodies moving through these sounds, responding to them, resisting them, becoming entangled within them.
The opening “Abertura” immediately establishes an atmosphere of uncertainty. Rather than presenting a clear thematic statement, it functions as a threshold, inviting the listener into a space where conventional distinctions between voice, gesture, and sound design begin to dissolve. Fragments emerge and recede. Textures suggest meaning without fully settling into it.
Then comes the wonderfully titled “Todos os pensamentos do mundo ao mesmo tempo” (“All the thoughts in the world at the same time”), which appears twice during the album in different forms. The title alone captures a distinctly contemporary condition. Most people now carry all the thoughts in the world at the same time inside their pockets, courtesy of smartphones and social media. Alvim’s interpretation is thankfully more poetic. Dense layers of shifting sonic material accumulate and transform continuously, creating a sensation of mental abundance rather than informational overload. The music does not overwhelm so much as proliferate.
At the centre of the album lies “Quadros” (“Pictures”), perhaps the project’s most revealing piece. Functioning almost as a compressed survey of the emotional catalogue, it assembles fragments from multiple affective states into a constantly shifting sequence. Listening to it resembles flipping rapidly through an emotional photo album where joy, anger, sadness, hope, and unease appear side by side, each illuminating the others.
The shorter emotional portraits themselves are particularly effective. “Riso” (“Laughter”) avoids obvious musical representations of happiness, instead exploring the strange textures and physical characteristics of laughter itself. “Cólera” (“Anger”) is concise but potent, capturing something of anger’s abrupt, disruptive nature. It arrives quickly, leaves an impression, and disappears before exhausting its energy, much like the emotion itself.
“Tristeza” (“Sadness”) stands among the album’s most moving moments. Alvim resists the temptation to portray sadness as purely dark or oppressive. Instead, the piece inhabits a more complex emotional space where melancholy becomes reflective, even strangely luminous. It suggests that sadness, like all emotions, contains multiple layers and possibilities.
One of the album’s most intriguing aspects is its treatment of the human voice. Carvalho’s vocal contributions rarely function as singing in the traditional sense. Instead, they operate as raw expressive material: breath, gesture, inflection, and timbre detached from semantic meaning. The result often feels uncannily intimate. We encounter emotion not through words describing feelings, but through the physical traces those feelings leave behind.
The historical references woven throughout the project add another layer of richness. “Esperança” (“Hope”) incorporates material derived from seventeenth-century composers John Blow and Henry Purcell, creating a subtle dialogue between past and present understandings of emotional expression. Yet these references never feel academic. They become part of the album’s broader meditation on how humans have attempted, across centuries, to understand their own inner lives.
The inclusion of “Inveja” (“Envy”) and “Temor” (“Fear”), pieces omitted from the original dance production, proves particularly rewarding. Presented here as independent works, they expand the emotional vocabulary of the album while highlighting its underlying premise: no catalogue can ever be complete. There will always be another feeling, another nuance, another contradiction waiting beyond the edge of classification.
What ultimately distinguishes “Música Para Mysterious Heart” is its refusal to resolve the tension between analysis and mystery. The project begins with systems, categories, and historical attempts to map human emotion. Yet the music itself continually escapes those frameworks. Every emotion spills into neighbouring territories. Every certainty becomes porous.
Crónica has long cultivated artists who operate comfortably between experimental composition, sound art, and conceptual exploration, and Alvim’s work fits naturally within that tradition. Yet despite its intellectual foundations, the album never feels remote. On the contrary, it is deeply human. Its complexities arise not from abstraction but from the irreducible complexity of feeling itself.
By the final moments, one is left with the impression that the album’s title contains a quiet joke. The “mysterious heart” remains mysterious. No catalogue has solved it. No treatise has explained it. No composition can fully capture it.
What Alvim achieves instead is something more valuable: a reminder that the attempt itself can produce remarkable beauty. Human beings may never understand their emotions completely, but they continue making art about them. Judging by “Música Para Mysterious Heart”, that ongoing confusion remains one of our better ideas. Vito Camarretta
We’re super happy to announce the release of Marla Hlady & Christof Migone’s second album in Crónica, On And On And Off, a fantastic set of 12 pieces created with the On And On And Off choir, exploring commutes from home to work and back. From home to work. From work to home. You get on your feet, on the bus, train, plane, bike. You get off your feet, off the bus, train, plane, bike. You walk, you ride, you travel. Sometimes you arrive on time. Often you are running late. Transportation gets you from one place to another. From point A to point B. Arrivals and Departures. Movements with purpose. Kinetics with intent. But sometimes you get on and it goes on and on and on and on and on. It feels like you might never get off. We are destined to destinations. A life on transit, a life in transit.
12 new tracks from Marla Hlady and Christof Migone released on as a cd and DL from Cronica based in Oporto, Portugal.
Both Marla and Christof have been collaborating since 2015 and this album is one of the finest points of their work together.
As usual there is an interesting concept that is a foundation of the output. In this case – it is an interesting invitation aimed at the listener – to ponder on the question of work-life balance, commuting and everything that is related to that question.
Marla and Christof invited collaborators to record all sorts of sounds that are related to this process – voices, field recordings, noises etc.
The effect is pretty interesting array of sounds – orchestrated, assembled and composed together in a way that makes you think of many things.
How cost effective has our lives have become? How life has become some sort of a function of survival? What is it exactly to live, to survive, to exist these days?
An interesting tableaux of different sounds with an idea that begs you to ask yourself and re-evaluate what is important?
”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)
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
