Matilde Meireles’s “Life of a Potato” reviewed by Bad Alchemy

Mit Life of a Potato (Crónica 180~2022, gelbe C-30) macht Dr. MATILDE MEIRELES das Leben und Wesen einer ordinären Grumm’bere, wie wir in Unterfranken sagen, hörbar. Als Postdoctoral Researcher Fellow an der University of Oxford im Projekt ‘Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism’ (SONCITIES) sind Scholle und Knolle eigentlich nicht ihr Thema. Allerdings hat es sie gelegentlich schon aufs Land gezogen, etwa zum Slieve Gullion oder in die Marble Arch Caves in Nordirland – sie hat in Belfast promoviert. Dort, wo Spuds und Crisps immer noch angesagt sind, hat sie wohl auch von An Gorta Mór gehört, der Irischen Kartoffelpest 1845-49, in der eine Million verhungerten und zwei Millionen vorm Verhungern flohen (‘Thousands are Sailing’ sangen die Pogues, und Primordial von ‘The Coffin Ships’) – eine Ungeheuerlichkeit, die noch in „Black 47“ und „Arracht“ nachhallt. Meireles, die von zuhause Batata portuguesa und Batatas ao murra kennt, spielt mit Klängen, die sie von einem Acker bei Pewsey in Wiltshire ausgrub: Mit holzigem Scharren und Beben, eisernem Klacken, dumpfem Kollern, der Regen plätschert, Vögel piepsen. Und sie bereitet was zu essen, schneidet rohe Kartoffeln, Tauben gurren, ein kleines Flugzeug brummt, Krähen krächzen, Spatzen tschilpen. B-seits wummern und pulsen Wellen auf dröhnendem Fond, gebackene Kartoffeln britzeln und brutzeln zu monotonem Klopfen und einem groovigen Loop, mit Schlagzeug sogar, und auch die Vögel hört man wieder piepsen und flattern, den Flieger brummen. Kartoffeln haben Augen, aber seit wann haben sie Ohren? [BA 114 rbd]

via Bad Alchemy

New release: Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais’s “Installations / Instalações” book

Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais collaborate 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, that they since run.

Since 2005 Tudela and Carvalhais have also been developing sound installations, the majority of which are ephemeral works lasting for the duration of an event or festival. The book Installations / Instalações documents nineteen of these works, offering a detailed look at them through visual documentation and texts by Carvalhais and Tudela and Raquel Castro, sound art curator and artistic director of Lisboa Soa.

This book is complemented by a series of releases that Crónica began publishing in 2021 — the first two being Installations: Seis Elementos (Crónica 174~2021) and Installations: LMY-7-10 (Crónica 179~2022) — and that will document these works by dedicating one album to each.

  • Book, 210 pages
  • 155 x 230 mm, softcover
  • 140 images
  • First edition of 500 copies in English and Portuguese
  • ISBN: 978-989-9049-13-0
  • Co-published by i2ADS
  • Main sponsor dstgroup

Table of contents:

  • Installations (2005, 2021), Miguel Carvalhais & Pedro Tudela 
  • Instalações (2005, 2021), Miguel Carvalhais & Pedro Tudela
  • Listening to Geometries, Raquel Castro
  • Escutando Geometrias, Raquel Castro
  • Divisor/4 (2015)
  • M.M.M.M. (2014) 
  • 30×1 (2005)
  • Respiro (2014) 
  • LMY-7-10 (2016)
  • Respiro (2015) 
  • Noventa e Três (para Colönia) (2012) 
  • Sulco (Medida de Corte) (2019)
  • (Re)Verso/Flexo (2018)
  • Octo____ (2019)
  • S(o)al (2021) 
  • CX LUX (2017)
  • Vento (2018)
  • Casa (2021)
  • Becoming- (2016)
  • A/B (2017)
  • 6 Elementos (2016)
  • T/B (2021)
  • Anotações Sonoras: Espaço, Pausa, Repetição (2018)
  • Studies / Estudos

Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais’s “Installations / Instalações” book reviewed by Vital Weekly

The next one is also a book, also (a bit of) a problem. This time, the text is in Portuguese and English, so that’s not the issue here. I like to think our principal interest is sound; we can hear on whatever sound carrier (don’t send your VHS tapes, please, or 8-track cassettes). Reading about sound already gets a bit more complicated, especially when it comes to theory. Still, in the case of Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais ‘Installations’, we deal with an art catalogue. You may know them as the duo @C, of whom we reviewed various releases over the years. They are a laptop duo rooted in field recordings, acoustic sound and improvisation. Another interest of theirs is the creation of installations. Since 2005 they did a few, and they are documented in this 210 pages softcover book, with 140 images, plus texts describing these and a more general introduction. It is undoubtedly a fascinating read, and the installations look fantastic, but it is not the ‘real’ thing. We miss a great deal of the experience, the sight and the sound. There are now two releases on the Cronica Bandcamp page that deal with two of these installations, and I strongly recommend playing these while flipping/reading this book (links below, they’re both ‘name your price downloads’). I know you’d still miss out on the visual side of the experience, but at least there is something to hear when looking at the pictures and reading the text. (FdW)

via Vital Weekly

Matilde Meireles’s “Life of a Potato” reviewed by Field Notes

From a Central European perspective, the potato is actually an exotic plant: originally it was only found in South America. In »Life of a Potato«, sound artist Matilde Meireles considers the migratory movements of food as well as its cultural coding. Field recordings from a garden in the south-west of England serve as the source material for a two-part work divided into a concrete and an abstract side. It discreetly questions the alleged banality of domestic activities related to food.

via Field Notes

Monty Adkins’s “With Love. From an Invader.” reviewed by Ambient Blog

Shortly after his release as Skrika on Cryo Chamber, Monty Adkins treats us with a surprise release on Cronica that musically represents almost the opposite of Skrika’s ‘dark ambient’. 
46 Minutes of field recordings, enhanced (I wanted to write ‘enlovelied’, but I guess that isn’t a word) by Adkins’s soundscapes that turn it into an otherworldly experience.

The invader referred to here is the rhododendron tree which “was introduced to the UK by colonial botanists in the late 19th century as an ornamental plant, it is now seen as a highly invasive species by ecologists.”

The rhododendron originally comes from China, the motherland of Yan Wang Preston, who in March 2020 decided “to photograph a single rhododendron tree every other day at half an hour before sunset, for a year”. 
The (environmental) sounds included were recorded on the same location each month.

“Living as an immigrant in a country going through Brexit and COVID, Yan felt a strong personal connection with such invasive plants. They remind her of her homeland as well as the complex perceptions around nature, national identities, landscapes and migration.” 

Like the seasons changing throughout the year, the 46-minute composition has a natural, uninterrupted flow. But in fact, it is highly dynamic: it is as changeable as the weather itself. 

Comparing the Skrika album to his work on With Love, From An Invader shows the versatility of Monty Adkins as artist and sound designer. This can be no real surprise for those familiar with his previous releases. 

I have found no links to the visual result of Yan Wang Preston‘s project, so we’ll have to do with the cover image. And with the images that Monty Adkins‘ soundscape evokes. 

Oh, and by the way: this is a Name Your Price release!

Peter van Cooten via ambientblog.net

New release: Matilde Meireles’s “Life of a Potato”

We’re proud to present Matilde Meireles’s new release in Crónica, “Life of a Potato”, now available as a limited release tape, as a download, or stream.

The potato has travelled a long way from its native lands in South America. The starchy tuber, brought to Europe by the Spanish in the late 1600s, slowly settled to become a key ingredient in most European countries’ traditional diet. As with many other vegetables, plants, and spices from elsewhere, we forgot the origins of the potato. We made them our own because food is an inherent expression of social identity. It tells stories, and evokes nostalgia, belonging, and wellbeing. Yet, the food system of the current times is desperately unsustainable. Like the potato, many other fruits, vegetables, plants, and animals travel far and wide daily, blurring territories, and playing an accidental part in the immeasurable impact of the politics of food production. The potato is an incredibly resilient element whose history traverses time and location, and its historical traces have very different socio-political nuances in the places I call home: Portugal, Ireland, and now England. It also grows seasonally in our garden and is a tasty tuber part of a rich sonic ecosystem. This seemed like a good starting point for a new project.

Life of a Potato uses a series of field recordings to unveil varied sonic perspectives of a garden near Pewsey in the Southwest of England. Here potatoes grow seasonally alongside other vegetables, plants, bushes, and flowers. The field recordings include vibrations of the soil underground, potato stems as well as the stems of other vegetables, reeds, vibrations picked up through the rake, the garden in the sun and rain. The recordings were made between April and August 2021 as the tubers grew into potatoes and then were shared at the table. Side A explores the various sounds around the garden and sounds of the repetitive, yet enjoyable, task of roasting the potatoes: cutting them in small pieces, massaging them with olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme and paprika. Side B is slightly more abstract. It explores various sounds of energy used to cook the potatoes, the potatoes’ crackling sounds as they come out of the oven and sounds of the garden in an early evening, in October, when the potato season is finished.

Matilde Meireles is a recordist, sound artist, and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects. Her projects often have a multi-sensorial approach to ‘site’ which draws from her studies and experience in areas such as field-recording, site-specific visual arts and design.

Matilde often highlights collaboration and participation as catalysts for a shared understanding of place, developing project-based or long-term collaborations. She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Oxford in the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (SONCITIES).

“Life of a Potato” is now available through Crónica.

Dan Powell’s “Four Walks at Old Chapel” reviewed by The Sound Projector

Brighton musician Dan Powell may be known to you as an improviser who performs as one half of The Static Memories and also occasionally with Paul Khimasia Morgan, but he’s here today with a slightly unusual field recording / musique concrète assemblage called Four Walks At Old Chapel (CRONICA 170-2021). He gathered field recordings at this Welsh location, as well as collecting objects from around the countryside to use as instruments in impromptu performances. Back in Brighton, he treated and collaged his tapes into these new arrangements, producing engaging and unexpected results. There are two added dimensions that give this cassette extra resonance; one of them is a personal / family connection, as he’s been taking his family on holiday to Old Chapel for a number of years, and indeed family members assisted with the gathering and playing of objects “brushing, scraping and rubbing them to produce a wide range of intimate sounds”, which they did in a straw hut. They even found, and incorporated, an old piano which had been left outside to moulder away. The second dimension is to do with Old Chapel Farm itself; it’s a collective experiment in social living, offering a new take on those self-sufficiency theories that were so popular among West Coast hippies around 1969, and shows the value of “living close to the land” and developing a sustainable way of life. Dan Powell aimed to create a personal audio statement reflecting and embodying all this, and has succeeded; it’s also gorgeous to listen to, and is much more intimate and teeming with life than many formal / academic experiments in the field of electro-acoustic composition.

via The Sound Projector

Matilde Meireles’s “Life of a Potato” reviewed by Beach Sloth

Matilde Meireles celebrates the surprisingly long journey of one of the world’s most beloved vegetables with “Life of a Potato”. For a field recording it is a rather stellar mixture of low-end and high-end sounds. Rather tactile every single element of the journey is magnified. No melody, no rhythm, this is a narrative that comes through with various sounds that reverberate throughout the entirety of the collection. Both songs have a sprawling, soothing aspect about them.

On the first track “Roughly 53 Steps” there is a bit of Matmos’ wry sense of humor brought in. The mixture of the domestic alongside the wild helps to give it that extra push to a degree. Starting off quiet the piece eventually comes to incorporate an entire ecosystem. Hints of the bird song in the background further give it a sense of place, one that feels ever so soothing to fully embrace. All of it works wonders in creating this peacefulness, one that focuses on reflection, on the gentle rhythms that make up a person’s day. Much more composed “or 38 Metres” features a stronger hand at play. Rather than let the sounds be, her approach is direct. While this is no dance track, no endearing melody, it does have a less abstract approach than the opener. Here the pulsing bass almost alludes to a great beyond.

“Life of a Potato” features an uncanny approach to storytelling proving Matilde Meireles to be a rather skilled sculptor of sound.

via Beach Sloth