Grabowski also appears on ‘Product 06’ by Cronica Electronica. Until now, two musicians were part of ‘Product’, together with a designer. But here we have three different musicians, apart from Grabowski, also The Beautiful Schizophonic and a track by James Eck Rippie and Paolo Raposo (the man behind Sirr-ecords). in Grabowski’s ‘But I’m Not’ he uses field recordings, radio waves, sine waves, voices and found sounds – the usual suspects for this kind of music. The radio and sine waves are easy to recognize, the other sources are a bit more difficult, but over the course of these fifteen minutes, he creates music that is much more vibrant and lively than his Mystery Sea release, less gloomy but still atmospheric. The use of reversed sounds add to the liveliness of the music.
The Beautiful Schizophonic, aka Jorge Mantas from Portugal, has had a couple of releases before, of which the one of Mystery Sea (see Vital Weekly 493) was the most interesting. Here he presents no less than ten short pieces of ambient music, much along the lines of his work on Mystery Sea. All treated neatly inside the computer to create dense atmospheric music from all sorts of obscured sources, including death, trash, grind and black metal music, but it remains all a bit too sketchy in the end. Why not throw all these fragments together and create one long big opus of atmospheric music. ‘file under: atmospheric laptopia’ it says on the cover, but place it in the subsection: fragmentary.
The third part of ‘Product 06’ is by Paolo Raposo and James Eck Rippie. The first being the man behind Sirr.ecords and Rippie has produced a very a nice LP with Colin Andrew Sheffield (see Vital Weekly 316). Rippie is a guitarist and turntablist, and although the liner notes don’t tell this, I assume this is a work of improvised music, with Raposo behind the laptop. The piece is all about playing the more atmospheric (again, and probably for that reason united with the others on this CD) tones of the guitar and the laptop, although there are more louder fragments to be spotted. It’s a nice piece, certainly the one with the changing moods and scenery’s throughout.
FdW