“Ification” reviewed by Rock-A-Rolla

Ification
Waves of austerity crash down upon the recumbent listener upon playing this much-delayed fourth solo release from Pure. Each of the seven pieces contained within are densely textured, revelling in their level of processed, electronic detail, seeming to present fractured splinters of a disintegrating persona while maintaining a similarly foreboding mood throughout. It’s a bit like a close-up examination of a healthy living specimen which reveals the microscopic bacteria devouring the flesh. The opening guitar drills of ‘Fire’ give an electric jolt to the system, but following that a mist of gloom and entropy cover proceedings. ‘After The Bomb’ is a dark, glowering swathe pinpointed with tiny glimmerings of light; ‘Approximation’ blends ghost-like doppelgangers of strings and horns into an almost modern classical feel and, most unsettlingly, ‘Sonomatopeia’ utilises unintelligible vocal samples courtesy of Alexandra von Bolzn which cackle, croak and chirrup as if nameless, unseeing creatures were beginning to populate the encroaching darkness. Ification is too seethingly active to be described as “Dark Ambient”, but it covers a similar territory of ever blackening mood-scapes and makes for hugely effective late night listening. Euan Andrews

Limited releases available at Inc.

Crónica and Inc. have teemed up for the sale of Crónica’s Limited Releases. From now on you’ll be able to purchase the Limited Releases (by Pedro Tudela, Miguel Leal, Ran Slavin and Marius Watz, with more to come) at the Inc. shop, a specialized seller of books and author’s editions.

“Ification” reviewed by Orkus

Ification
Hinter der schicken, verdrogt gestalteten Klappverpackung lauert das Chaos: Mit dem Opener Fire zumindest erwischt das Ambient-Projekt Pure den Hörer auf dem falschen Fuß. Verzerrtes Gitarrengedröhne statt weitläufiger Drones. Dennoch ein enttäuschender, weil langweiliger Auftakt. Danach wird es schon besser, und Ification beginnt zu wirken. Behutsam werden die Stücke aufgebaut, zögerlich gesellt sich Detail zu Detail, bis zitternde Drones, umgarnt von einer Armee digitaler Spielereien, den ganzen Raum eingenommen haben. Ification wohnt dabei zu jeder Zeit ein tief liegendes Gefühl der Beunruhigung inne. Gleich einer Filmmusik, die an betreffender Stelle urplötzlich bedrohlich wird, haftet auch Pures aktuelles Album jenes latente Gefühl einer Bedrohung an, die jedoch die gesamte Spielzeit über unspesifizierbar bleibt. Besonders Approximation nimmt mit satten Tönen und nervösem Geflimmer viel Raum ein und verlangt bei hoher Lautstärke starke Nerven – ja, der dunkle Track erinnert vom Grundtenor beinahe an die Musik des SchockersShining! Abgesehen von dem nichtssagenden Auftakt und dem irgendwie wirkungslosen, befremdlichen Iron Sky eine äußerst versiert in Szene gesetzte Ambient-Collage. (8) Björn Springorum

“Lovely Banalities” reviewed by ORE

Lovely Banalities
Šiais metais pasirodė jau dešimtasis Ginto K albumas pavadinimu Lovely Banalities. Šį kartą, kaip beveik visuomet, Ginto albumas nebuvo išleistas Lietuvos leidybinėje kompanijoje, bet portugalų Crónica. Vietiniai lietuvių garso menininkai kuria įdomius kūrinius, tačiau išleisti praktiškai nėra kam. Galbūt tai ir jokia problema, mat interneto pasaulyje geografinė padėtis vis rečiau ką nors lemia, svarbiausia – rezultatas. Albumas įpakuotas minimaliai išdailintame kartono dėkle, kuris, deja, atlaiko neilgai. Bet apie rezultatą čia noriu parašyti…

14 kūrinių albumas – ramių, kompiuteriu sukurtų ar tiesiog lauke geros kokybės aparatūra įrašytų virpesių, kartais nustebinančių ar erzinančių triukšmų prisodrintas darbas. Kaip albumą pristatančiame tekste rašoma: „tai darbas, talpinantis 14 individualių momentų, kurie parengti pašalinio klausytojo apsilankymui; kūrinys, savo forma ir struktūra lyg ir paprastas, tačiau tas paprastumas – kaip ir gyvenimo kasdienybė – yra iliuzija“.
Dažnai klausydama elektroninių garsų, ar elektronikos sumišusios su fieldrecordings negalvoju apie idėjinę darbo pusę, man svarbu, kaip sugebės ir ar sugebės kūrinys/albumas „užkabinti“, sudominti. Visgi garso menas kartais būna tikrai nepakenčiamas, ir be poros išklausymų (kurie nutinka dėl bendro išsilavinimo ar tiesiog noro paklausyti) albumą metu į šalį.

Neretai muzikoje ieškau kažko patrauklaus, įdomaus, kažkokių aiškesnių struktūrų, arba tiesiog įdomių, o gal ir gąsdinančių, bet traukiančių garsų ar panašiai. Jei taip nenutinka, kad ir kaip tai būtų modernu, nauja ar „ant bangos“, savęs neprievartauju.

Tačiau su Ginto K elektronikos žaidimų ir lauko garsų įrašų Lovely Banalities taip neatsitiko, albumas tiesiog įtraukė. Po kiekvieno albumo išklausymo norėjosi jį vėl dėti į grotuvą. Lovely Banalities – nebanali, jauki muzika bei šilti garsai iš aplinkos: žmonių balsai, vandens čiurlenimas (nors ir dažnas motyvas fieldrecordings elementų turinčioje muzikoje), sukuria gero ir stipraus albumo įspūdį. Autorius sugeba atskirus garsus sujungti į originalią visumą, į struktūrą, po kurios jaučiamas garsų ir melodijų vientisumas; muzika paveikia tave. Pateikiamo nei per vieną, nei per penkis kartus įsisąmoninti nepavyksta. Tačiau ir po daugelio klausymų išlieka noras įsigilinti į albumą. Sakyčiau, įdomu ir vertinga.

ORE vertina 9/10

“Lovely Banalities” reviewed by Tokafi

Lovely Banalities
“Lovely Banalities” is the second Gintas K-CD released by “Cronica Electronica”. Both collaborations of this Lithuanian sound artist and the Portuguese label specialising in electronic music seem to foster fascinating outcomes that are real discoveries for admirers of digital music rooted in various branches of microsound. This time, it is an album intended for careful and adventurous listening and an intense musical experience.

Already on first track “In”, you might suddenly realize that you’d like to listen to “Lovely Banalities” with your eyes closed. The track begins with a few simple vibrating tones, gradually evolves into a major chord, then dissolves into generated melodies which fall into various spacious points in between right and left of your speakers. Finally, it grows into a tin-consonance colored by a slight distortion. At that point, the sonic, compositional logic of the album has been all but completely revealed to you. If you accept it with grace, you’ll enter a marvelous journey through pretty sophisticated sound spirals, which are highly dynamic, dense, lavish (in the sense of offering a colorful timbre palette) and spacious, as it seems as if your speakers are put into a highway of (micro) sonic flow – both horizontally and threedimensionally, quite schizophrenic in a way of constantly diverging and unifying sonic objects.

You will find these elements in nearly every piece, especially in those, where sonic plasticity is the key. “Just 2” divides listeners’ attention in between an intensifying murmur of blunt bubbles (you can hear a few layers of them) and resonating timbre, which dives in and out. “27” evolves with a few nets of pinging transformator-like sounds and step-by-step wraps up a simple melody. All tracks are centered around hardly palpable compositional ideas and cranked up or gently directed towards a textured sonic tapestry, painted by granular sounds. That is why your thoughts might barely move as they’re trapped into this grainy sparkling of sound, which insensibly infects the way you perceive space and time at that particular moment.

However, the tracks are interconnected by short episodes of field recordings, made in Gintas K hometown Marijampolė. The recorded sections are not too cinematic and one can treat them simply as gestures of remembrance. It’s the most opportune time for the listener to grasp the meaning of the title of the album, “Lovely Banalities”. And that’s how one realizes the narrative and imagery that lies behind the sonic forms: they become expressions of moods. “Found feeling” isn’t just one of those sonant and bright chords, sounding like a crystal – but it’s also this poetic “found feeling”, maybe from somewhere there, in Marijampolė, or anywhere else in the listeners mind and her/his own experience. There is quite a hypnotizing bit of melancholy and transparent (and somewhat tricky) sentimentality in “Lovely banalities”. It might leave this taste after a thorough listening, as the last track, already mentioned “Found feeling” creates a lazy sunny mood, but it’s scratching composition and microscopic changes of mood-shapes might resemble somebody sitting in a terrace one summer afternoon enjoying the purposeless dance of the meaningless gaze.

Gintas K once drew a parallel between “Lovely Banalities” and “Pictures at an Exhibition” – a famous suite by Modest Mussorgsky, where every piece becomes a musical interpretation for a picture and one is listening to the suite as if she / he would be passing the doors from one imagery to the other and having promenades in between them. I find this parallel amusing, as “Lovely Banalities” is full of adventurous transitions between sonic perception, sophisticated compositions and imaginary moods, feelings and memories. (Tautvydas Bajarkevičius)

via tokafi.com

“Ification” reviewed by D-Side

Ification
Inclassable, l’Autrichien Pure n’a jamais cessé, au fil d’une discographie longe et aventureuse, marquée par une pléthore de collaborations, de refuser toutes les frontières et toutes les chapelles. Tour à tour proche du glitch, du hardcore, du jazz expérimental, de la musique concrète et même du dark ambient, Pure est partout, et surtout lè où l’on ne l’attend pas. Hétéroclite au possible, Ification (on notera le jeu de mot facile) apparaît donc comme un “résumé” de tout ce que Pure est capable de produire dès lors qu’il est correctement entouré. Aidé ici par la guitare samplée de Christoph de Babalon, il se fait bruitiste (“Fire”) avant de virer à la BO lancinante pour film post-apocalyptique soulevée en fim de parcours par la batterie de Martin Brandlmayr (“After the Bomb”), tourne au glacial, ose les cris et les crissements (“Sonomatopoeia”) ou la claque sans rémission (“Iron Sky”). Dense et varié, Ification nécessite pas mal d’écoutes afin d’être apprivoisé dans sa globalité, mais c’est un effort qui en vaut la peine, tant il révèle l’étendue du talent d’un artiste qui a parfois tendance à se disperser, mais n’en demeure pas moins une référence incontournable. Jean-François Micard