blog.Crónica

Pour ce septième album – le troisième sur le label Crónica -, les plasticiens sonores Miguel Carvalhais et Pedro Tudela continuent leur interrogation de la musique en tant que forme d’art, en tant que message médiumnique davantage que médiatique susceptible d’établir un lien entre la nature extérieure et la forme intériorisée contenue dans ce cd. Alors évidemment, les quatre pièces présentées activent les notions de mobilité et de voyage. Dans la durée (deux pièces de 20 et 40 minutes, deux pièces de moins de deux minutes), dans l’espace, les field recordings servant de matière modelable et agençable ayant été saisies dans différentes villes européennes, dans le temps également puisque leur captation s’étale sur cinq ans, de 2002 à 2007. Et dans la forme bien sûr, puisque voix, résonances spatialisées de sons électroniques, bribes d’instants de vie saisis au détour d’un micro, collaborations émaillées avec divers artistes, percussionnistes notamment, se télescopent et s’interpénètrent avec cette force du document sonore vivant, du work in progress intrigant, qui caractérisent le travail poético-fantasque de ces deux manitous d’une musique concrète de traverse.

Laurent Catala

This bizarrely entitled album is another fevered and improvised trip into musical and sound from the minds of the @c (Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela)- it’s a dense mix of rhythmic elements, field recording, modern classical and avant jazz textures, electronic elements, noise and of course improv- having been quite taken by their De-Tour collaboration from last year with Vitor Joaquim I had high hopes for this.

Through out this mainly homes in on the more manic and dense side of their work with sadly none of the tense and almost suffocating feel of De-Tour present here. The pair layer up all manner of rhythmic matter, field recordings, electronic textures, stretched voice elements and musically side lines and it often feels quite big and cinematic in it presence. Sure it’s strange, manic and otherworldly but it feels often too dense, too over loaded in its sound make up, so as a result interesting sonic elements seemed to get drowned or brushed aside in the storm of sound. Sometimes improvised music, Musique concrete and experimental music can become too clever, too muilt-layered for it own good and that what’s happened here. The pair seem to be concentrate so much on detailing and painting up the sound layers that they just about stripped all the atmosphere, entertainment and sonic wonder from the album.

I really tried to like this as I’d been so taken by De-Tour , but sadly I just keep return to feeling that it’s just too dense and trying to be clever for it’s own good. Sure it’s impressive in its construction, depth and density of sound but emotional it just so flat and unappealing

Roger Batty

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

Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela haben sich durch Fieldrecordings, Liveaufnahmen und Studiosessions allein oder mit Gastmusikern in den letzten fünf Jahren eine Menge Basismaterial fuer ihr neues Album erarbeitet. Aus diesem Fundus konstruierten die beiden vier spannende Musique Concrète-Studiokompositionen, die die unterschiedlichsten Klang- und Geräuschquellen kombinieren und nie langweilig werden.

A quite brilliant offering from @c, who are Crónica label bosses Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais, with third member Lia contributing live visuals and sleeve art. The music here is by turns witty, dark and ravishing, with acoustic instrumentation, particularly percussion, woven into the dense digital fabric of the sound with great flair and precision. Though pieced together from a wide array of sources, chiefly live recordings, the emphasis is on heightened moments rather than any kind of overarching structure, with the duo resisting what they term “idealised composition”. (This deliberate fragmentation, one assumes, explains the title, which relates to categories of quarks in particle physics.) This looseness never sounds slack, however; throughout they evince both the stern alertness and imaginative flexibility required to drive successful improvisation. It’s a music that shifts and mutates in surprising and often delightful ways, plus it’s beautifully recorded — real widescreen stuff.

Keith Moliné

Settimo disco firmato @c, duo elettro-acustico portoghese composto da Miguel Carvalhais e Pedro Tudela qui all’opera su una serie di file-recordings registrati tra il 2002 e il 2007 in giro per l’Europa, catturando performances musicali da Porto a Glasgow, da Lilla ad Helsinki, da Lisbona a Vienna, da Londra a Monaco di Baviera. Materiale questo poi rielaborato e cucito attraverso continue manipolazioni anche alimentate da una radicale componente improvvisativa, così che balbettii vocali, corde di violoncello elettrico tese allo spasimo e diafani echi di sassofono vengono inglobati all’interno del tessuto sonoro acquistando una nuova consistenza organica.

Lavoro composto da 4 brani anche se centrato sostanzialmente intorno al primo e al quarto, visto che gli episodi intermedi sono solo dei brevi bozzetti, tutto sgocciolamenti il primo, fatto di abrasioni e sfregamenti il secondo. Notevolissimo il pezzo di apertura intitolato “62”, venti minuti di secrezioni elettroniche cristallizzate in un dub minimalista, disossato e cerebrale, alle quali si aggiungono insistenti caracollamenti percussivi fatti rimbalzare su pareti metalliche e poi affondati in acquitrini ambient.

Guido Gambacorta

@c’s Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom declares its unique character even before a single note is heard. There’s the unusual group name, for starters, and then there’s the album’s four tracks, two of which are under two minutes, and the others twenty and forty. Assembled using studio, live and field recordings, Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom is, in fact, the seventh @c full-length from members Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, and their third on Crónica. Carvalhais and Tudela are sonic alchemists who piece together elements into collages of restless, shape-shifting character. In the accompanying notes, they accurately describe themselves as sculptors, explorers, and even watchmakers with the album signifying “one more step in finding our way in music, looking for something we can’t really define.” In their constructions, Carvalhais and Tudela wrestle with the tension between the recording in its static form as a “finished” document and the improvisation strategies which they bring to the recording process as a means for liberating sound from the structural foundations of a given composition and that “finished” state.

@c’s explorative spirit is nowhere more evident than in the opening “62” whose hyperactive flow is somewhat normalized by the inclusion of Miquel Bernat’s percussion playing. Real-world elements likewise ground “71” and “72” where dog barks and amplified water are audible in the first, and the decayed grooves of Stephen Mathieu’s 78 RPM discs in the second. Not surprisingly, the album’s coup de grace is “61,” not simply on account of its length but because it integrates contributions from a huge supporting cast that includes vocalists, percussionists, and a sax player, guitarist, and electric cello player. Don’t think for a moment, however, that “61” sounds conventional for even a single second; Carvalhais and Tudela treat their guests’ sounds just as malleably as they do their own, making “61” even more uncompromising than the three pieces before it. The piece is like a huge, multi-limbed alien organism that never stops changing colour and shape while writhing relentlessly and sometimes violently for an exhausting forty minutes. Admittedly, the individual instruments do identifiably assert themselves on occasion—the cello and kalimba most audibly extricate themselves from the whole—but more often than not the contributors’ sounds are absorbed into @c’s complex web.