A tide of new producers increasingly peg their work as “experimental” although few it seems have meditated on what it means to generate such work. The cliché is that experimentalism is characterized by its difficulty. Experimentalism is that which challenges us in our listening practices or our expectations of structure and convention. However, when carpetbombing the audience with noise or random algorithmic output is so easily accomplished, the genre itself cannot be defined by its absence of expectation, for there is nothing worse than feeling bored by what we already expect from experimental music. Circular? Yes, quite tautological, and in the worst of journalism’s clichés, this author pronounces Crónica as slicing this vicious circle. This Portuguese label does so in three ways: one, each sound, whether improvised or programmed, is meditated, which has little or nothing to do with intentionality, but rather the intuitive fabric of time in which sound generates its events; two, there is a reason for each sound in its existence, and although we know this reason does not actually exist, we are compelled to keep listening in the search for meaning at the boundaries of music; and three, each artist approaches this process differently.
Look: there’s one word for it, and it’s intelligence. Throughout the delicate weaving of field recordings, the evolution and disintegration of microrhythmics, and the dis/assembly of hisses and tones, there flows a restless variation between a track’s quantum events, its pits and pockets of sound, and its micronarrative of relativity, which bends sound to the gravity of the work. We encounter art, not a genre.
Take @c’s v3, a collection of dialogic, live improvisation between Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais and a cohort of musicians. v3 pilgrimages through microsonic tones, ambient recordings and mutated percussive elements to pull broader frameworks of repetition from the world’s ether. The journey is one of discovering the fringes of territories skirted: here a rhythm that could develop into click’s ‘n’ cuts, but like a stealthy follower of Lao Tse, chooses to seek solace in the melting hum, only to encounter movement yet again, an aberrant jazz brush playing softly in the distance. Orbiting the system is a disruptive scratch, eventually gathering the detritus, over long elapses of time, into subsequent sequences of pulses. This is a quiet but drastic work that increases its depth with its volume, yet in its clarity of production retains extraordinary detail at low levels, like the best of Trente Oiseaux, 12k or Ritornell. @c’s visual artist Lia contributes minimalist, geometric configurations that lend the eye a plane in which to drift.
Tobias C. Van Veen