This atypical album is divided into four tracks of unusual and disparate lengths – the first lasts more than twenty minutes, the second and third are less than two minutes long, and the last stretches out to more than forty minutes. ‘Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom’ by Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, aka @C, is a collection of sonorities that come from many and various sources. The soundscape forms an eccentric continuum, but one that remains sensitive through the expert use of well-chosen field recordings and an agreeably calibrated overall balance. The listener is also immediately aware of the relationship between the single episodes and the whole composition. The album essentially functions as a label catalogue and is rich in “sample guests.” It also makes good use of sounds accumulated during many live performances, and takes inspiration from previous studio outtakes. Such an assortment is testament to the range of influences at play here. The album is replete with creations that have been born out of fruitful collaborations from previous years. It exhibits sequences with an intense amalgamation, and is rich in very imaginative solutions. It’s a contemporary electroacoustic album, where voices, short instrumental intermezzo, loops and more synthetic drones emerge. There are references to chromo-dynamic and unstable quark-sonic particles (following the same title inspiration, related to the quark electric charge theory). There are six varieties of “flavours” – actually there are many more, because here the abstract music becomes more pertaining to matter and the super-vivid. (Aurelio Cianciotta)
via Neural
