“Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom” reviewed by Vital

Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela are @C, armed with their laptops they play mostly improvised music. However, important, they don’t release improvised music. How is this possible. Their improvisations are restricted for playing together, in a concert like situation, with or without audience. All of the resulting recordings are taken into the studio and used as building blocks for their music. On this, their seventh release, they use recordings from concerts, studio work and field recordings which they recorded over a period of five years and deals mainly with the improvisations they did with others. Sometimes the ‘other’ was present while everything was played, sometimes the ‘other’ arrives through the form of a sample. They remove all the ‘unwanted’ bits of improvisations and use only that which hold the test, and these are used in these four constructions. They are vibrant, lively pieces of musique concrete, sometimes not unlike releases on Empreintes Dgitales, but with a more anarchistic, free approach. The software used is not the what it is about, but it’s result, which, as @C say, ‘becomes itself, and will become music each time it is played, to everyone and everywhere it is so’. Which I believe is very much true. There is so much happening on every level of this disc, that it requires a few rounds of listening until everything is uncovered and then the ‘real’ thing starts again: finding the overall picture again. It’s a full CD, but one that has a lot to give. Great work. (FdW)