blog.Crónica

On paper, you might assume an album structured from old Nintendo game sounds and 1990’s-era VSTs would be cheeky chiptunes- but this Durán Vázquez album is nothing of the sort. ‘Hikikomori’ is social reclusion and while the atmosphere here is insular, and isolated, this isn’t the sound of somebody playing computer games. This is tense drone soundscape work- beatless, hollow, resonant, drawn-out synthetic tones with washes and twinkles.

The work has two sides, LP-style. On the first side, there are five tracks, four of which share the same name, “Solus Ipse”. The first of these has a glass-like wailing tones at the top end are so harsh that they are sometimes painful, telling you this work won’t function as an ambient chillout affair, the second introduces gradually crescendoing notes of tension and confusion. The third is more mellow, with distant string-like ebbs and occasional fragile percussive sounds. Brief interlude “Koroshiya” brings a hint of ethnic flute tonality, before the final “Solus Ipse” revisits the earlier disquiet.

The second side is a single 26-minute work, “Segunda Natureza (trebón, paxaros, electrostática)”, where the retro-chiptune sounds are really heard. This is mostly a more playful piece, still essentially a drone base but lighter, with arpeggio patterns, 8-bit-style percussive moments and occasional single-step bass notes akin to having somebody in the next room playing a classic NES. Moods do shift throughout, with some sections more sombre and the latter sections more sparse, but this piece manages to feel both more unique and more inventive.

It’s an album of two halves in which the second half is more recommendable than the first, but overall it’s a noteworthy take on the solitary drone soundscape form. Stuart Bruce

via Chain DLK

Three new releases from Crónica take the listener from Portugal to Greece to Scotland. Geographically dispersed as the origins of these composers may be, the works hold a firm common Crónica thread in serving aural tapestries amongst the best in avant-garde contemporary music on the verge of composed acoustic and electronics music.
Durán Vázquez work a full year on his tape Hiku Komuro, Hikikomori. Asking himself questions, holed up with his gear. Can we know an aural world outside our own; the one we hear in our head? The one ears tell us is there; we hear inside? Is hearing a product of outside phenomenons getting in or could it be that we can never really know what goes on outside – i.e. not within our own brain, mind, soul. Solus Ipse. Wandering alone – never in real contact; or, oh well… that than is as much the real contact as we can get. It doesn’t get any more. That’s not to say it’s a good or bad thing in and of itself. It just is. And we cannot know, for sure. Really.
Vázquez conjures plains and fields of sparse instrumentation. Very high pitches are never thinning out the spectrum, which one might expect. Nor do these glistening glass organ like shimmerings and piercing tones project eerie connotations. These frequencies are those of which resonance is made. A transportation of rumblings and murmurs, pulling on the soul’s strings like perpetual high droning of eternal movement. Here dark skies are pushed away. Not per se to let the sunlight in, but to wipe clean the crowded and muddied slate. Vázquez seems to be aiming for an aural tabula rasa – far from emptied out or minimally reduced. His quintet of works on the a-side promote vistas of zen gardens with slight breezes and birds singing in animated dialog with an idiosyncratic stillness of ease always present – back- and foreground.
In his Galicia based studio Vázquez composes his works using samples of old video games as prime source materials, together with FM synthesis and other synths. On the b-side his acousmatic soundscaping has been impregnated with gentle use of bleeping noises and swooshes reminiscent of arcade space battle. The gently bubbling, slowly creeping tar- or lava like structure gives way to multiplicities of translations; the full spectrum from highly advanced sci-fi technological down to purely natural meadowlands teeming with wildlife. Like a fascinating soundscape of field recordings from field yet uncharted, unseen, unheard – most likely only existing inside Vázquez’ and our own head(s). (SSK)

via Vital