@c’s “Espaço, Pausa, Repetição” reviewed by Toneshift

In these two nearly half-hour long works, otherwise known as ‘Sonic Annotations: Space, Pause, Repetition‘ the duo @C (Pedro Tudela + Miguel Carvalhais) has delivered a multisensory, immersive, site-specific sound installation from three-hundred sound objects (many collaborators).

Their video offers a good dose of installation porn, especially if you are into speakers and wires. No joke here as this gives you a glimpse into the experience within a white wall museum context. Look closely, and get lost. The first half of this tape features Espaço, Pausa. It sparse minimalist aesthetic seems to showcase many of these objects, one by one at first. I particularly like the anonymity of particular sounds (some are organic, most are not), and how they stir up your senses and make you think. All is interspersed in succession in quick, idiosyncratic actions. After five or so minutes overlaps in these voices, clangs, twists, semi/permeable, rings, and otherwise quirky intonations start to materialize. The mood is fairly open, ears pricked up, trickling and twitchy sounds breaking the tension before Speak n Spell murmurings surface.

One might compare this to a rag-tag orchestra trying to embody the din of any large urban city at full tilt, only through the filter of a dreamscape. It’s like you are inside a virtual reality video game fortress that is gaining and losing coins and points by the second, bouncing from screen to screen, yet falling into a glorified spatial black hole, and repeating (without revisiting familiar territory).

Repetição opens with a voice in repetition, and then strange silences. When the voice returns the layering is off by a beat, trying to decode the layered texts is futile. A contemporary spoken-word transmission-style beat poetry with intervals of blank space, and intermediate sizzle, feedback, tick-tock, crashes, tweaks.  I can imagine modern dance presented as part of the cadence as delivered, the pacing leaves the sudden space for the body to transition. As on the flipside, this piece starts to use up more of its silences with drone and transitory ambient textures. Stay for the final five minutes of sequences, it’s a sheer mind-meld time-warp worthy of any surround sound system! TJ Norris

via Toneshift