blog.Crónica

The Beautiful Schizophrenic is the pseudonym of sound designer Jorge Mantas, an artist who clearly has a bit of a fixation on Marcel Proust: all but two of the titles here are borrowed from lines of text from the author’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu – La Prisonniere. Of course it’s utterly preposterous to try and compare Proust’s monumental literary achievements to an album of drone-based microsound, but Mantas is keen to cite the links between love, melancholy and memory as a key factor in his own work, even being so bold as to pose the question: “Could this be a possible sound equivalent to the literary images of affection written by Proust in the early 20th century?” He then proceeds to answer the question with “Probably we’ll never know.” It’s hard to listen to this album without being haunted by the rather troubling sense that the composer is getting ideas above his station, but taken as a body of work on its own, detached from any delusions of grandeur, there are ample rewards to be reaped. The Basinski-style faded elegance of ‘un étourdissant réveil en musique’ is hard to resist, and the wonderful concrète cocktail ‘les oiseaux qui dorment en l’air’ is a real joy. Mantas even gets a little assistance from Cecile Schott – Colleen herself – on ‘La Lectrice’, a piece which (as the title suggests) consists of a reading, adding a more human edge to the bitcrushed orchestral passages that make up much of the disc. If you’re in search of some epic, romantic ambient electronics, you could do worse than lose some time listening to this. Lovely.

It caresses the mind and careens forward, this Beautiful Schizophonic (Jorge Mantas). Musicamorosa is a selection of passages, deep and full-bodied in passionate drone. Music for the awakening of the soul, no doubt. Much of this was influenced by the romantic sense of time, and losing it, in the literary work of the great Proust (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust). The disc is most cavernous at times (“Du Fond Du Sommeil Elle Remontait Les Derniers Degrés De L’escalier Des Songes”), taking a surging river ride at others (“Les Oiseaux Qui Dorment En L’air”). On “La Lectrice” (The Reader) he employs multi-instrumentalist and composer Colleen (Cécile Schott) reading without accompaniment from Proust while in Paris. It causes for a linguistic pause before once again floating amid the luminous “L’amour, C’est L’espace Et Le Temps Rendus Sensibles Au Coeur.” Chambers of translucent whispers and the elongated echo of whistling carry the sense purported on “L’éternel Matin”. What Mantas, who fancies himself a sound designer rather than a composer, ends up harvesting here is randomly conceptual as a long player. It works in sections, but perhaps it may be best left alone, to simply bathe into the entirety of its length. And in conclusion, it does with the thirteen minute gem “Soixante-Quatre (@C Pour T.B.S.)” which combines all that is grande about electronica today, a glint of minimalism and the subliminal power of the soundtrack. And while pre-empted by hushed, fidgety goings-on the end straddles those moments in-between, that time actually forgot. Which is to say the subtleties of Musicamorosa will carry its secrets into the air like a swarm of bees, vying on extinction, on a particularly humid day.

TJ Norris

Sehr Konzept-bezogen und doch so schön. Jorge Mantas liest Proust und schon gibt es Tracktitel. Und auch die Musik ist von dem Literaten inspiriert, wie das funktioniert, muss man hier nicht ausbreiten. Viel wichtiger der Klang, und wenn man unbedingt Vergleiche ziehen will, dann ist dieses Album die definitive Mischung aus Marsen Jules, Gas und dem Teil abseitigen Experiments, das für Laptopper einfach unvermeidlich scheint. Mantas ist immer auf dem Punkt, immer gut, wenn das Experiment den Wohlklang unterstützt, die Drones in freundlichen Harmonien an uns vorbeiwehen. Das Album hat einige solcher Tracks. Und die sind dann auch gleich richtig gut.

Thaddi

Décidément cette rentrée musicale est, pour ma part, placée sous le signe des disques en marge. Ceux hors normes, difficiles d’accès lors de la première écoute mais qui au final se relèvent merveilleusement beaux. Le premier album Musicamorosa de The Beautiful Schizophonic en fait partie ; distillant ses charmes envoûtants au fil des écoutes successives.

Composé autour de l’œuvre de Marcel Proust, Musicamorosa est un album de “done music”. Une musique composée à base d’instruments classiques (claviers et guitares) et d’habillages électroniques le tout fondu en un amas sonore compact formant une masse musicale dont les lentes variations s’égrènent délicatement au fil des minutes. En résulte un subtil mélange entre bruits/bourdonnements et ambiances electronica (la rythmique en moins) formant d’abstraites plages sonores. Prenant pour titre un extrait de l’œuvre de l’écrivain français, chacune des compositions de The Beautiful Schizophonic soustrait aux mots leur grammaire musicale alternant silence, chuintements à peine audibles ou volubilité atmosphérique. Un parallélisme entre sons et mots mis en exergue sur le morceau “La Lectrice” ou Colleen, seule, lit à haute voix un extrait d’écrits de Proust avec pour seul décor la musicalité de sa voix et des mots.

Empruntant à Proust son élégance et son romantisme littéraire, The Beautiful Schizophonic (de son vrai nom Jorge Mantas) compose ici un album aux charmes alambiqués ou alchimie des mots et ambiances sonores s’entremêlent étroitement laissant planer la préciosité de quelques autres grands noms comme celui d’Eric Rohmer, d’Edgar Allan Poe ou de Wong Kar Wai….

Neu auf Crónica ist “MUSICAMOROSA”, das Debut von THE BEAUTIFUL SCHIZOPHONIC, der sich von romantischen Malern und düsteren Dichtern (Poe, Dante) beeinflusst sieht und seine Drone-Schichtungen aus vielfach verloopten Streichern und diversen anderen electronischen Zutaten mit Titeln aus Prousts “Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit” schmückt. So richtig zwingend ist das nicht, zum Chill-out im Avantgardeclub aber sicher brauchbar.

Last time I heard from Jorge Mantas was with his cdr on Mystery Sea. I had shared a cd with him on Thisco, and I really liked his dark, concise, sometimes lo-fi approach to digital drones. I’ve lost traces of him for a while and now I discover he’s mellowed out: pink layout, Proust quotes everywhere… what the hell… No, really… This is undoubtedly a new course for Mantas, but it’s a great one, and his musical ability has improved dramatically. His drones have turned melodic and moody, and beneath the sugar-coated layout they have maintained an edge that prevents them from becoming dull or nauseous (with the darker “L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur” reminding of his previous production). With its 13 tracks and 65 minutes, it’s a quite lengthy work, and my loveless heart forces me to take a break now and then – but the quality is high throughout. Guests like José Luís Merca (Matéria Prima, at electric guitar), Tobias Strahl (Dies Natalis, at acoustic guitar) and Cécile Schott (Colleen, reading Proust, obviously), help make some tracks more varied, and Mantas knows how to dose their contribution. @c closes the album with a glitchy, more upbeat remix, which is ok but maybe a bit redundant. I would recommend this disc to anybody into Dead Texan, latest Beequeen or Stephan Mathieu, and melancholic electronica in general – it hardly gets any better than this, me thinks.

Eugenio Maggi

“Uno stordente sogno in musica”, “gli uccelli che dormono nell’aria”, “un giardino ancora silenzioso prima del levarsi del giorno”, sono alcuni dei titoli prelevati dal corpo della “Recherche” di Proust che la musica del portoghese Jorge Mantas alias TBS anela ad evocare. Scaturito nel 2003 da esperimenti personali con computer e minidisc, il progetto trae ispirazione da una varietà di stimoli culturali, dalla pittura di Dante Gabriel Rossetti al cinema di Eric Rohmer, mantenendosi sul filo di un intimismo introspettivo dai risvolti romantici. Con l’aiuto di alcuni ospiti alla chitarra più un intermezzo di passi proustiani letti in francese da Cécile Schott, l’autore si muove su un terreno in cui è facile scivolare nell’estetismo fine a se stesso. L’attenzione di Mantas si focalizza quindi, con esiti discreti ma non essantanti, sulla capacità dei suoi atmosferici soundscape e ambient drone melodici — assemblati al laptop come uno scrittore davanti alla sua macchina da scrivere — di comunicare genuine emozioni con languida e sensuale malinconia. Per citare un altro titolo, “una prova dell’esistenza irriducibilmente individuale dell’anima”.

Vittore Baroni

Very delicate drones, fluctuating atmospheres, rarefied ambient scores and glitches, fragments of a literary universe (Proust’s, in his ‘Récherche’, several times cited as the main source of inspiration by Jorge Mantas, aka The Beautiful Schizophonic), infused in romantic empathy, ‘heart throbs’ and melancholic visions, redundant intimate experiences. A sensitivity that, in the (romanced?) figure of the contemporary laptop composer, ideally immersed into the dark of his room, lost in a ‘plunderphonic’ ecstasy, finds other similarities and elective correspondences. It’s a crystal-clear and sensual production, enriched by the contribution of José Luis Merca and Tobias Strahl, dilated in field recordings, poetic reminiscences (Cecille Schott is ‘La Letrice’), contemporary aesthetics invading the listening experience with pathos and elegance.

Aurelio Cianciotta

In the promotional materials surrounding his new release, Jorge Mantas [aka The Beautiful Schizophonic] says: ”Marcel Proust has been one of the main sources of inspiration to me in the last years. His ideas devoted to the affections of the human heart, his approach deeply rooted on the long literary French tradition in which love can only be lived in sadness, is something that goes much beyond pure aesthetic. So it came only natural that somehow I would try to convey this literary and philosophic interest with the sound aesthetic I pursue. The image of a sleepless solitary writer confined to a Parisian soundproof room, has everything to do with the experience of a modern laptop composer, alone in the dark of a room, in a sort of headphone ecstasy with his acoustic fragments of reality. Both experience loneliness. Both are melancholic dreamers creating from an imaginary memory of the world.“

Let‘s face it, Mantas is a true romantic. Along with Proust, erotic photography and French new wave cinema, he§s hornier than a toad on influences that art has to offer. His music is less romantic than his direct surroundings, but nonetheless, there is an air of softness to what he makes. The drones he manufactures on his laptop and minidisc are illusionary. You think you‘re hearing something but in fact it‘s the constant, reinforcement of the drone in your head that makes you think you‘re hearing something else entirely. Two duos with guitarist Jose Luis Merca are more along the lines of field recordings than anything else. In both cases, guitar‘s unique sounds have been masked over quite well. When he collaborates with Paulo Silva, the effect is symphonic and quite uplifting. One of the more moving numbers is “Dans la chambre magique d‘une sibylle” where Tobias Strahl contributes some nicely flowing acoustic guitar loops. Another stunning piece is “La lectrice”, which features Collen [Cecile Schott] reading Proust in Paris [final piece on the record is a long remix of this very same track as done by @c]. Stunning in its singularity of purpose and loveliness of delivery. As with most things, if you try as hard as Mantas, you‘ll find drones too can be made to sound lovely and inspiring.

Tom Sekowski

Hosted by Jorge Mantas, under the cloak of indulgently named and inclined The Beautiful Schizophonic, comes this assemblage, drenched in a musk of hyper-imagined bedroom-bound longueurs of laptop-lathered longing (mmm, the indulgence is infectious!). Musicamorosa is trailed with the heady referential aromatics of artistic influences ancient and modern. In addition to Proust – about whom he has draped the main fabric of the conceit on which the album is founded, he reels out a parade of writers (Poe, Dante), painters (Friedrich, Waterhouse, Rossetti), moving on up to French new wave cine-auteurs such as Rohmer and Rivette, then their post-modern postcursors Wong Kar-Wai and Sofia Coppola, before clinching the deal with a couple of erotic photographers. This ferment of ideational and sensual lays the ground for the incubation of a veritable wallow in sonic reverie.

The prime sonic strategy underlying The Beautiful Schizophonic is the drone, but that “schizophonic” element brings with it an array of indoor field recordings, sampling and acoustic instruments, laptop-manipulated. Mantas, somewhat preciously perhaps, but no less honestly for the faint reek of pretentiousness that will strike some, purports to be “searching for the sonorization of affective environments that express my deepest innerself.” To which the most immediate response might be: “Aren’t we all?!”, but once you break through the verbiage and the opening sequence drifts in, it sweeps away sardonicism, casting an incantatory spell. Your heart may start to ache and a drowsy numbness may even pain your senses, Keats-like, as if of hemlock you had drunk.

Musicamorosa seeks no less than to patch itself, however obliquely, into Proust’s ideas on the affective life of the heart, rooted in the French tradition of romantic pessimism. The Proust-derived track titles are more suggestive than directorial, and, incidentally, an expressively engaged antidote to the hermetic blankness of much abstract electronica. Mantas draws further linkages between the unquiet solitary writer confined to a Parisian soundproof room and the experience of a modern laptop composer, himself enclosed in his own headphone ecstasy with its fragmentary aur-reality. Both are dream-basing melancholics, the one whose search for temps perdu must live on retrieving scraps of deleted scenes in re-thinks and memory-jags, the other in analogous music-mediated soul searches. Links between love, melancholy and memory are invoked through digitised orchestrations speckled with electro-acoustic shadings. Musicamorosa’s drones are charged with harmonic iridescence, of which the peculiarly pretty-in-pink girlie-cartoon artwork shouldn’t be seen as representative. More than a hint of shadow attends the luminous “un étourdissant réveil en musique”, an aching melancholy t(a)inting its sweetness. “L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur” sounds no less than the subject’s suspension in lovelorn languor turned to dark drowning.

Viewed in the context of a somewhat sullen and spotty debut on night-ocean drones label, Mystery Sea, Musicamorosa can be seen as a more elegant and affective creation – a romancing of the drone. At times it approaches the air of wistful refinement of such as Stars of the Lid or Eluvium. In its more technology-blurred moments, as on the concrète of “les oiseaux qui dorment en l’air” or the gorgeous “cantiques à la gloire du soleil”, the less ascetic of Basinski-believers could be seduced into the beautiful schizophonography secreted on Musicamorosa.

Alan Lockett