For Percussion is a collection of six electronic tracks with various acoustic elements incorporated into the recordings. Some of these tracks were recorded live during performances from 2002 to 2008, while others have been recently revisited in 2022. The electronic components and core compositions were created by @c a duo composed of Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, artists on faculty at the Fine Arts College at the University of Porto in Portugal. The percussion is all performed by members of Drumming Grupo de Percussão a Portuguese percussion ensemble founded and directed by Miquel Bernat.
The music takes heavy influence from artists like Luigi Russolo as well as composers as Edgard Varèse Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Frank Zappa. One of my favourite tracks “66, for sampled bells, computer” is reminiscent of a slower paced, modernised trance version of the opening to “Poème Électronique.” In “88,” the composers incorporate various microphone elements and placements to affect the recording a la “Microphone 1.” Finally, Zappa’s references are evident in the first and final tracks, both in style as well as some direct references: take a listen to “Buffalo Voice” from Zappa’s
Civilization Phase Ill for the vocal addition at the very end of this album.
It is difficult to differentiate the original source material performed by Drumming GP with what has been modified or digitally created from @C. The electronic and acoustic components work well together to create a seamless soundscape of sonic explorations. This is done exceptionally well with track “88,” a recording using stones scratching and scraping objects, into “88R,” a remixed version done entirely electronically. Even though they use the same source material, there are little-to-no comparable sounds between the two; however, @C creates something hauntingly similar with a unique, tech-driven aural landscape to encounter.
Although these experimental compositions may not be for everyone, this album generates eclectic effects utilizing wide-ranging sonic interesting, thought-provoking digital alterations and additions, For Percussion provides a timbral spectrum worth investigating in experimental electronic music.
Some years ago Miguel A. García informed me he was starting to work with string ensembles and classical players, directing musicians who can sight-read music to play his scores or execute directions in music devised by him. This represented quite a departure from his usual solo work with laptops, mixing desk, and processed recordings.
I keep hoping to get sent a CD of the “new” sock-it-to-em García approach, but today’s record Eraginie(CRÓNICA 206-2023) doesn’t seem to be representative of it. Instead, it’s four tracks of very grainy and granular processed noise, which suggest he hasn’t yet traded in his Apple Mac for a conductor’s baton. The label are hoping to wow the audience with García’s new hi-fi approach, telling us he’s turned his back on all that home-made distorted messy noise that he used to trade in, and has created a record fit to be broadcast on any art gallery PA system, the better for its sedate audience to savour the subtle tones and textures and delicate glitchoid experiments. A number of fellow creators have provided “additional raw sound sources” for him to create this record, namely Pedro A. Mirones, Maite Mugerza, Garazi Navas, Schahram Poursoudmand, Alex Reviriego, and the American Jeff Surak of Zeromoon.
Sadly, I found little excitement or tension in these slow grey stretches of digital combines, and I miss the days when my favourite Spaniard from Bilbao would send me genuinely shocking and unsettling records of home-brew noise. But maybe I’ll learn to love this low-key mode of Miguel’s – after all, better to be served a cucumber cocktail than given a digital slap in the mush. Ed Pinsent
“Kleine Geluiden”, das neue Album des niederländischen Künstlers Kunrad alias Koenraad L. de Groot, erscheint am 18. Februar bei Crónica als limitierte CD und digitaler Download. Die Veröffentlichung kompiliert Aufnahmen aus seinen Klanginstallationen und Performances der letzten sechs Jahre, in denen er, wie er es beschreibt, “die kleinen, oft überhörten Klänge unseres Alltags feiert und auf ein Podest hebt”. Kunrad, ausgebildet in elektronischer Komposition und interdisziplinärer Klangkunst, bewegt sich an der Schnittstelle von Musik, Kunst und Performance. Seine Arbeiten umfassen Maschinen, die Regen und Papier in Klang verwandeln, ein 50 Meter langes, von Menschen betriebenes Carillon oder Konstruktionen, die metallene Röhren durch die Luft schicken. Diese akustischen Momente, eingefangen mit wechselnden Mikrofon-Setups, sind nun erstmals als eigenständiges Hörerlebnis zusammengestellt.
“Kleine Geluiden”, dessen Titel auf deutsch “Kleine Geräusche” bedeutet, verbindet organische und mechanische Klangquellen zu einer dichten, detailreichen Struktur. Manche Stücke erinnern mit prasselnden, elektrifizierten Klängen an experimentelle ASMR-Techniken, andere vermitteln die physische Präsenz der ursprünglichen Installationen. Die Aufnahmen wirken dabei nicht dokumentarisch, sondern als offene Erzählungen, die die Vorstellungskraft der Hörerinnen und Hörer herausfordern. “Ich hoffe, dieses Album wird wie ein Buch sein, das einlädt, sich die Konstruktionen und Räume vorzustellen und neue Geschichten zu erfinden”, so Kunrad. Mit seiner minimalistischen, oft flüsternden Ästhetik fordert Kunrad zur aktiven Auseinandersetzung mit Klang auf: “Ein Mensch, der flüstert, ist besser zu verstehen als einer, der schreit”. In diesem Sinne ist “Kleine Geluiden” nicht nur eine Sammlung akustischer Eindrücke, sondern ein Raum für neue Wahrnehmungen und Deutungen.
Over the past six years, Kunrad has created installations and performances that celebrate the small, often overlooked sounds embedded in our daily lives, placing them on a pedestal. From machines that transform rain and paper into the first Physical Audio Workstation, to contraptions that send 1,000 small brass tubes ringing and tumbling through the air. Performances where stones are thrown into water with intent, or a human-powered carillon, spanning 50 meter long ropes, harnesses, and rubber hammers striking a bridge at the heart of a city.
Driven by a passion for field recording, he captured these fleeting, temporal moments using an ever-changing array of microphone setups. We are now delighted to present these recordings, extracted from their original artworks and curated into a new, standalone listening experience.
Hopefully, this album will act like a book, inviting you to imagine the contraptions, the spaces, and invent new stories behind the sounds. In this way, it becomes a canvas for your imagination, a place where new worlds emerge so that kleine geluiden, small sounds, find new ways to enrich our daily lives.
Kleine Geluiden is now available as a limited-release CD, stream or download from Crónica.
Four contemporary field-recording types from Portugal on Lisboa Soa: Sounds within Sounds (CRÓNICA207-2023). Lisboa Soa calls itself a Festival, but it seems to be a lot more than that – growing some sort of locus for like-minded fellows to gather and thrive, and propounding the notion of “acoustic ecology”, grounded in ethical ideas about our shared environment. They believe we can achieve a lot just through the simple act of listening. This particular release was a commission, delivering new works from João Castro Pinto, Sara Pinheiro, Mestre André and Ana Guedes. However, it seems none of them roamed the wilderness with their tape machines to collect new sounds, and instead all four pieces have been assembled using existing tapes stored in the Festival’s archives. Mixed results; I get the feeling everyone was a bit too respectful to the sources and didn’t feel inclined to try anything especially bold or daring, although moments of Mestre André’s ‘No Earlids’ serve up a few pebbles and twigs of dramatic noise, and Guedes does at least make the effort to transform the original tapes on her ‘Splicing_archives_’. Very few specific environmental sounds emerge from this processed and layered melange, and one starts to wonder what exactly we are hearing. I find this lack of contextual detail vaguely troubling; the notes supplied by each creator tell us more about their selection methods and their multi-channel spatialisations than they do about the earth’s environment. Ed Pinsent
A new album by Philippe Petit, and they come by quite often these days. “Closing Our Eyes” is a 45-minute exploration of the boundaries between acoustic and electronic music, one of Philippe’s recurrent exercises. The promo sheet we always get with Crónica releases gives a little overview. He started with recontextualising Mahler’s first symphony, ‘Cordophony’, after which he kept the connection with acoustic instruments in his sound pallet. And admitted, this is well executed and produced, but there is a ‘but’ for me. The big but for me is experimentalism to ‘just’ experiment. Don’t get me wrong, not a bad word about the separate tracks, but I miss the coherency between the tracks. There is no general modus, no story being told … The concept is the symbiosis between acoustic instrumentation, electronic sound and the manipulation of acoustics in the electronic domain. The separate tracks are exceptionally well executed, for example, in “Part 2”, where the marimba seems to have a lead role as well as cymbals, and a lot is being done with resonant frequencies creating an ever so lovely soundscape. ‘Part 4’ has a central role for a prepared piano, but having heard “A Reassuring Elsewhere” and “Passing Thru” not too long ago, I am left with a weird feeling here. If you’ve just released albums with all piano sounds, why wasn’t this on one of those albums? Because it’s a beautiful track! Here, the beauty of it is lost between all the experiments. Maybe it’s also because a lot of the experiments are shorter tracks. The two tracks I mentioned are 10-minute, so Parts 2+4 are almost half of the album. That’s what I meant with coherency earlier. The drone layer in the 2nd part of “Part 5”: beautiful! The closing “Part 11” opens incoherent but becomes very lovely too with again a lead role for the piano. “Closing Our Eyes” will not become my favourite Petit album, but it might carry my favorite Petit moments. (BW)
‘Kleine Geluiden’ is Dutch and means ‘small sounds, ‘ which leads me to think Kunrad might also be Dutch. Of course, it might not be accurate, but he is. He has a Bachelor of Music in Composition for Electronic Music at the University of the Arts Utrecht and a Master of Music at the Interfaculty ArtScience in The Hague, where he resides. While he is interested in small sounds, that doesn’t mean his music is tranquil. His website, http://kunrad.net/, shows many of his installation pieces, some of which are full of small sounds. It maximalist minimalism. On this CD are recordings from installations from the last six years, “from machines that transform rain and paper into the first Physical Audio Workstation, to contraptions that send 1,000 small brass tubes ringing and tumbling through the air. Performances where stones are thrown into the water with intent, or a human-powered carillon, spanning 50 meter long ropes, harnesses, and rubber hammers striking a bridge at the heart of a city.” To quote is sometimes better than to summarise. I admit the music had more impact after I studied his website. I first heard the CD, put it aside to return at a later point, then read and watched his website and finally played the CD again. While I find the music interesting, I think seeing the action makes the difference, especially since Kunrad takes quite some time to play his pieces, quickly between 11 and 17 minutes, which is quite long, as I certainly ‘got’ the idea halfway through. This longitude might work much better when sitting and taking it all in. ‘Brass & Sand’ and ‘Stones & Water’ are relatively quiet music pieces, the latter reminding me of Etant Donnes. The other four pieces, three of which deal with water and paper, are much noisier constructions, of which the last one, ‘Bridge & water’, has an interesting sparse character. Perhaps this is more a document of sound art than an album of independent music pieces. (FdW)
Expansão stems from a performance in July 2022 in Porto. This performance was commissioned by Sonoscopia that hosted a residency leading to it. During that period the three musicians explored synergies in their approaches to music-making with electronics, computers, and concrete sound, preparing structures and strategies that would shape the performance. Similarities, intersections, tensions, contrasts, and harmonies between their practices were articulated in exploring the palettes each brought to the field. Expansão is rooted in a recording of this multichannel performance. It fixates and documents aspects of the performance and of the process leading to it. It is also something of a distanced echo, framed by the removed perspective of the musicians in the months since, a period during which several edits and mixes were developed, leading to the expansion of the original performance that is now published.
Jérôme Noetinger is an improviser and composer of electroacoustic music, based in Rives, Isère, France. He is a part of the collective Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine and plays solo or with several other improvisors. www.jeromenoetinger.fr
Pedro Tudela & Miguel Carvalhais have collaborated as @c since 2000. They have released and performed extensively, often collaborating with other artists and collectives in a practice marked by radical experimentalism with computational sound. In 2003 they established Crónica, a label dedicated to experimental music and sound art. at-c.org
Miguel Carvalhais en Pedro Tudela, de mannen achter het Portugese Crónica, vormen sinds 2000 samen ook een duo: @c. De twee zijn vooral bekend door hun installaties, waarvan een paar jaar geleden ook een fraai boek, met de doeltreffende titel ‘Installations’ uitkwam. Uit mijn recensie citeer ik hier nogmaals hun opmerking over dit genre: “an installation a holistic work in the complexity of the relationships it develops with the space, the visitors and the aestetic gaze. It’s location is a starting point, it is a given, but it is not only canvas of framing because it becomes a part of the work.” Gaandeweg zijn de twee nu de muziek van deze installaties aan het uitbrengen. Hierbij dan ook aandacht voor de drie meest recente albums, die natuurlijk verschenen bij Crónica, alle drie als download: ‘Installations: octo _ _ _ _’, ‘Installations: CX LUX’ en ‘Installations: (Re)Verso/Flexo . ‘Octo _ _ _ _’ is een permanente installatie in Esposende, opgezet in 2019 en bestaat uit een ensemble van modules in de duinen, tussen de stad en het strand: “It is a pierce that coexists with a constantly changing environment, a myriad of sounds forming a soundscape to which it also contributes. The piece blends with its surroundings, seeking to integrate with the existing elements, spreading over a wide area so sounds can be perceived from a gamut of perspectives and scales”. In bijna veertig minuten horen we een gevarieerd en rustgevend klanklandschap: de wind, de zee, een geluid dat doet denken aan klokken, bellen en verder wat onbestemde overige geluiden. Klik bovenstaande link bij het album aan en u vindt een kort filmpje van deze boeiende installatie. ‘CX LUX’ was in de zomer van 2017 te zien en te beleven in Porto, als onderdeel van het Alumia programma. Als plek koos @C de Lada lift, in de wijk Ribeira. Het gaat hierbij om iets wat we in Nederland niet tegenkomen: een lift om een lager stadsdeel, in dit geval de rivierzijde van de stad, te verbinden met een hoger gelegen deel, het oude deel van de stad. Een deel dat de laatste jaren sterk veranderd is en voor de oorspronkelijke bevolking niet altijd ten goede. “While working on this piece, we spent time in a neighbourhood that had long been familiar to us but in which neither of us had lived. We met people, explored the meandering streets and researched the radical transformations experienced during the lifetimes of its inhabitants. What we learned led us to create a piece that, much as Ribeira, was continuously transforming, with a daytime sound installation at the upper-level passageway of the lift and a nighttime light installation at the tower’s façade”. Het leidde tot een installatie waarin vooral verdwenen geluiden een plaats kregen. We horen de klokken van kerken die al lang gesloten zijn en de koeienbellen van de veemarkt die vroeger lag waar nu de ingang van de lift bij de rivier is. Dus inderdaad, ook hier weer klokken in dit prachtige en ook wat weemoedige stuk van anderhalf uur! Het is met name de galm van de kerkklokken die hier opvalt, een geluid dat een zekere mystieke spanning geeft aan het stuk. En boeiend hoe op enig moment de geluiden van de kerk- en de koeienklokken in elkaar opgaan.
‘(Re)Verso/Flexo’ was een installatie, in 2018, in het klooster Santa Joanna in Aveiro, nu een museum. Gemaakt in een vijftiende-eeuwse eetkamer, sober, maar rijk gedecoreerd. “We tried to explore the room’s spiritual resonances, working from ideas such as introspection and hierarchy. The installation was developed along with the tabletops, mounting lights, loudspeakers, and mirrors that reflected sounds and light to the tabletops…The sound objects used include readings of numbers, an evocation of the seating assignments carved on the tables, and the numbers of the scriptures read during meals”. Passend bij de setting is dit een bijzonder intieme geluidssculptuur geworden, waarin we het bovenstaande zonder meer terughoren. De basis bestaat uit ondefinieerbare ruis, iets dat een zekere spanning aan het stuk geeft. Het wordt aangevuld met die enigszins vervormde stemmen. Een enigszins mysterieus aandoend geheel creëert @c hier. Ben Taffijn via Nieuwe Noten
Terug naar de elektronica, met een bijzonder project van Jos Smolders: ‘Textuur’. Het eerste album ‘Textuur 1 [numbers 1-9]’ verscheen bij Moving Furniture Records, het tweede, ‘Textuur 2 [ |||| – – – – ]’ en derde, ‘Textuur 3 [Register]’ kwamen uit bij Crónica, waarbij de laatste louter als download. Een bijzonder project waarin Smolders “Investigate(s) processes with which to strip sounds from their original context and slice them into tiny bits. By doing this, sounds are separated from their source and as such severed from what they originally represented”. Smolders borduurt hier door op wat Pierre Schäffer zo’n zeventig jaar geleden reeds deed, maar dan met het knippen en plakken van tape, iets wat we musique concrète zijn gaan noemen. ‘Permutations 1’ op ‘Textuur 1’ is daar direct al een mooi voorbeeld van. Dat was in de tijd van Schäffer een ongelofelijk arbeidsintensief proces en wat dat betreft heeft Smolders het nu wel wat gemakkelijker, maar toch, ook bij hem zal er aardig wat tijd ingekropen zijn. Want beluister deze stukken goed – waarbij liefde voor het experiment wel een voorwaarde is – en je bemerkt dat vrijwel geen snipper geluid langer dan een seconde duurt! Smolders is daarbij wars van alles wat maar enigszins op een melodie lijkt, het gaat hem louter om geluid en de samenhang tussen al die verschillende bronnen. “There are two groups of sound”, Zo legt hij uit over die bronnen: “First there are the collections which consist of samples of the original material. The other group consists of various permutations”. Die brengt hij samen tot een nieuw geheel, noem het gerust een collage. Wat geenszins wil zeggen dat er geen structuur in zit, die is er wel, maar openbaart zich niet altijd op de geijkte wijze. Neem een stuk als ‘Collection B’, op datzelfde eerste album, het begin roept associaties op met een machine, het verdere verloop met het geluid dat we bij videospelletjes vaak tegenkomen, maar er is zeker sprake van harmonie en hier ook van ritme. Wat Smolders ook regelmatig doet, is een soort van volgorde aanbrengen, zo werkt hij zowel in ‘Collection A’, waar het eerste album mee begint, als bij ‘Permutation 3 en 7’ met het uitspreken van getallen. Experimentele muziek dus, waarbij Smolders ons regelmatig op de proef stelt. Bij ‘Permutation 4 en 5’ en ‘Collection D’ zal menig luisteraar die deze muziek niet gewend is, zich dan ook afvragen of dit nog wel ‘muziek’ is. Het antwoord luidt natuurlijk: “ja, ook dit valt onder deze categorie, wen er maar aan!”.
Smolders maakt zijn doelstelling mooi duidelijk in de toelichting bij het tweede album: “This album is part 2 in a series where I investigate processes to strip sounds from their original context and slice them into tiny bits. By doing this, sounds are separated from their source and as such severed from what they originally represented. What’s interesting and challenging for me in the project is to find the crossover area where representation disappears, and the sound becomes an abstraction”. Dit album begint met ‘Collection’, een duistere drone van ruim drie minuten, twee keer kort onderbroken, waarna we in de nodige ‘Permutations’ – nu voorzien van letters, in plaats van cijfers – en nog één ‘Collection’, nummer 2, verder kennismaken met Smolders’ muziekopvattingen. Nu betreft het echter wat langer uitgesponnen klankwerelden, wat dit album iets toegankelijker maakt dan het eerste. Over het algemeen bevat dit tweede deel overigens vrij duistere muziek, met als mooi intermezzo’s het duidelijk door dance beïnvloede ‘Perumtation C’ en ‘G’. Smolders noemt in de toelichting bij dit tweede deel nog een belangrijke inspiratiebron voor deze serie albums: de Yucatan gedichten uit 1971-72 van Carl Andre: “What struck me most about the poems is that the letters and the words seem to sink back into the visual form. Depending on their focus the reader either watches an abstract shape or reads words and letters. I found this very interesting because the (sound of the) human voice, words, meaning and representation often play a significant role in my work. Here a visual artist and one-time poet seemed to work with the same idea from a different perspective”. Een analyse waar Andre, zo blijkt uit een korte correspondentie van Smolders met hem, het overigens totaal oneens is.
Voor het derde deel, bestaande uit ‘Collection’ en verder ‘Permutations’, gebruikte Smolders “the recording of an automated customer distribution system that I encountered in a New York Whole Foods store” als basis. Hij vervolgt: “The voice was not unpleasant, had a certain musicality and rhythm to it. Customers were standing in line, staring at their phone, or actually being on the phone. The voice came from an overhead speaker system and was accompanied by a colourful screen underlining the next register. In a sense it caused me to think of how customers had become cattle, albeit not in a slaughterhouse but as actors in a consumerist trap”. En zo beginnen we met een stem die “Register” uitspreekt, gevolgd door een nummer, maar het zou Smolders niet zijn als dit in de goede volgorde plaatsvindt. En is het eerst nog allemaal prima verstaanbaar, ook dat wordt gaandeweg de ‘Permutations’ steeds lastiger, zo is er in ‘Permulation G’ geen touw meer aan vast te knopen. Wel mooi zoals Smolders hier verderop het ritme een rol laat spelen. Soms ook horen we louter klanken, in ‘Permutation B’ in de vorm van aanzwellende en afnemende klankgolven en in ‘D’ in de vorm van stromende ruis. Ben Taffijn
