Sixth in a series of Product releases on the Portuguese Cronica label, “Product 06” features a variety of artists firmly rooted in the electro-acoustic / laptop / experimental side of the spectrum.
Polish composer Pawel Grabowski says this about his piece “But I’m Not” which opens this compilation: “But I’m Not is just one, 20 minutes long track combining voices, field recordings and broken electronic sounds. It was recorded the day before I moved in to a new place, with most of my stuff laying around in boxes, the only thing that I had unpacked was my laptop and those few sounds that I used for composing this piece. The whole music was recorded that very last night in this candlelit room…” The elongated piece is a continuum study in space sounds – what sounds like asteroids slowly drifting in the sky is actually Pawel appropriating voices. What resembles creaking doors is Pawel experimenting with twisted sounds on his laptop. Truly a haunting and mesmerising take on one man sitting in an empty room, alone at night. Portuguese journalist/musician Jorge Mantas, who goes under The Beautiful Schizophonic moniker delights with a ten-part suite “Love Songs for a Psychoacoustic Girl”. Made up of short vignettes that tickle and tease the ears, laptop-processed sounds are windy, shifting and mostly subtle. They run the gamut from tickling drain pipes to gurgling, bubble-drifts to gloom-and-doom appropriations and high-pitched cricket sounds. Though the piece works well as a stand alone, at the end of the suite you’re left gagged and unsatisfied and pleading for more.
Finally, we arrive at the closing “Natureza Morta” by sound/media artist Paulo Raposo and visual/sound artist James Eck Rippie. Nothing on this 19 minute piece suggests that drones are not crucial in the duo’s creative thought process. In fact, the luscious landscapes these two come up with turn out to be like a layered sea of winds, like a caressing ocean full of good tides. Actual wave sounds in fact seem to have made the final mix. In addition, muted jackhammer blows appear, along with cave-like sounds and ethereal samples from short-wave radio. Yet another fine piece to add to the collection of drone-induced library.
Tom Sekowski