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”

Cover of the album 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 Bandcamp Daily

DRIFT was a research and arts project commissioned by the city of Belfast to encourage interaction and understanding of the River Lagan. A series of exhibitions and events took place in the summer of 2024 on a specially-designed pontoon on the river. As part of the project, field recordist Matilde Meireles explored the sound of the river, its surroundings, and its wildlife. Four Tales gives us four perspectives: “One” places the river in a global context alongside recordings of England’s River Avon, Portugal’s River Tejo, Spain’s River Tambre, the Mediterranean Sea, and a storm in Mozambique. “Two” takes us between two points on the river, ducking below the surface and incorporating its metal structures and nearby electromagnetic interference. “Three” is a survey of the nearby wildlife in which all local species are named in a voiceover, but only some are heard in the recording, highlighting how field recording only ever gives a partial rendering of its location. And finally, “Four” is taken from a live performance on the DRIFT pontoon itself, featuring Meireles playing alongside percussion and tromba marina. These four compositions are brilliant in their own right, but taken together, they form a dazzling mosaic of the River Lagan and its crucial role in Belfast.

via Bandcamp Daily

Matilde Meireles’s “Four Tales” reviewed by Music Map

Matilde Meireles è una sound artist portoghese, da tempo attiva nel campo della composizione elettroacustica e autrice di alcuni lavori di installazioni e ricerche sul campo, specialmente in contesti urbani e naturali sull’asse Portogallo – Regno Unito, legandosi a Belfast, capitale dell’Irlanda del Nord.

L’artista ha da poco pubblicato per Crónica Records “Four Tales”, un album che, di fatto, rappresenta un vero e proprio dispositivo di ascolto collegato al progetto Drift, una struttura galleggiante sul fiume Lagan pensata come spazio pubblico e strumento di ascolto, per esplorare nuove prospettive di connessione tra città e fiume.

“Four Tales” si propone di tradurre in musica un ethos e un sentire comuni, con quattro movimenti diversi, ma collegati e in qualche modo complementari: nel primo, “One”, coesistono alcuni field recordings provenienti da luoghi diversi, ma accomunati dalla presenza dell’acqua, con l’obiettivo di indagare il rapporto e l’intreccio tra elementi naturali e infrastrutture umane.

I due episodi successivi approfondiscono questo approccio: “Two” insiste sui pattern ritmici dei micro – e macro – movimenti dell’acqua, mentre nel terzo si indaga sulla biodiversità e sulla distanza tra quello che la tecnologia può registrare in un arco temporale e la presenza reale in quei territori.

Il quarto movimento, “Four”, nasce da una performance collettiva e aggiunge note di improvvisazione, ma conserva un saldo legame con l’ambiente circostante e la sua stessa idea.

“Four Tales” supera la dimensione meramente musicale e si fa esperienza più ampia e totalizzante: una bellissima e concettuale espressione di sound art, che merita tempo e attenzione per essere davvero interiorizzata. (Piergiuseppe Lippolis)

via Music Map

Machinefabriek’s “Spelonk” reviewed by Chain DLK

There is a particular kind of honesty in artists who admit they occasionally need to escape their own commissions. Not dramatically, not with some tortured manifesto, just quietly stepping aside to make something that answers to no one. With “Spelonk”, Rutger Zuydervelt, better known as Machinefabriek, does exactly that. No brief, no external narrative, no polite obligation to synchronize with images or choreography. Just sound, left alone to see what it becomes.

Released on Crónica, the album consists of three long pieces, austerely titled “I, II, III”. Which is either refreshingly minimal or mildly passive-aggressive, depending on your tolerance for conceptual restraint. Either way, it sets the tone: this is not a record interested in guiding you. It barely acknowledges your presence.

Zuydervelt’s process here is deceptively simple. “Hardware jams”, he calls them. Oscillators, pedals, small electronic devices, hands moving, decisions made in real time. But the real work happens afterward, in layering and recombination, where fragments of improvisation are folded into each other until something coherent, or at least compellingly unstable, emerges. The emphasis on listening as a phase of composition is crucial. These are not performances captured; they are environments discovered.

The title “Spelonk” translates roughly to “cave”, and the metaphor holds. Not in the cliché sense of darkness and echo, but as a space that reshapes perception. Inside a cave, distance behaves strangely, sound reflects unpredictably, and your sense of orientation quietly dissolves. That is more or less what these pieces do.

“Spelonk I” opens the record with a relatively contained exploration. Textures flicker in and out, like light filtering through an unseen opening. There is movement, but it feels cautious, exploratory. The piece seems to be testing the acoustics of its own world, sending out signals and waiting for their return.

Then comes “Spelonk II”, which expands everything. Duration stretches, layers accumulate, and the sound field thickens into something closer to a living organism than a composition. Low frequencies pulse beneath granular surfaces, while higher elements drift like debris in slow motion. It’s immersive without being overtly dramatic, which is harder to achieve than it sounds. Many artists equate length with significance. Zuydervelt simply lets time pass and trusts that something will reveal itself within it.

By “Spelonk III”, the album reaches a kind of equilibrium. Not resolution, exactly, but a steady state where the elements coexist without needing to assert dominance. The piece breathes. It contracts and expands subtly, maintaining a tension that never quite resolves into narrative. If the previous track was exploration, this feels like habitation.

Zuydervelt has been refining this kind of practice for years, moving fluidly between commissioned work and more personal releases. His discography under the Machinefabriek name is vast, often orbiting themes of memory, texture, and spatial perception. What distinguishes “Spelonk” within that body of work is its immediacy. There is less mediation here, less conceptual framing. The sounds feel closer to their source, even when they become abstract.

That said, “immediacy” does not mean simplicity. The album’s strength lies in its balance between control and unpredictability. Each layer is carefully placed, yet the overall effect retains a sense of discovery. You can hear the process thinking, adjusting, reacting.

There is also a quiet refusal embedded in the record. In an era where music is often optimized for context – film, playlists, background consumption – “Spelonk” resists utility. It does not accompany anything. It does not explain itself. It exists, patiently, asking only for attention.

Which is, admittedly, a demanding request.

But if you grant it, the reward is a set of spaces that feel strangely alive: alien, as Zuydervelt suggests, but not hostile. Just unfamiliar enough to remind you that listening, when taken seriously, is still a form of exploration. Vito Camarretta

via Chain DLK