blog.Crónica

Neu auf Crónica ist “MUSICAMOROSA”, das Debut von THE BEAUTIFUL SCHIZOPHONIC, der sich von romantischen Malern und düsteren Dichtern (Poe, Dante) beeinflusst sieht und seine Drone-Schichtungen aus vielfach verloopten Streichern und diversen anderen electronischen Zutaten mit Titeln aus Prousts “Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit” schmückt. So richtig zwingend ist das nicht, zum Chill-out im Avantgardeclub aber sicher brauchbar.

Last time I heard from Jorge Mantas was with his cdr on Mystery Sea. I had shared a cd with him on Thisco, and I really liked his dark, concise, sometimes lo-fi approach to digital drones. I’ve lost traces of him for a while and now I discover he’s mellowed out: pink layout, Proust quotes everywhere… what the hell… No, really… This is undoubtedly a new course for Mantas, but it’s a great one, and his musical ability has improved dramatically. His drones have turned melodic and moody, and beneath the sugar-coated layout they have maintained an edge that prevents them from becoming dull or nauseous (with the darker “L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur” reminding of his previous production). With its 13 tracks and 65 minutes, it’s a quite lengthy work, and my loveless heart forces me to take a break now and then – but the quality is high throughout. Guests like José Luís Merca (Matéria Prima, at electric guitar), Tobias Strahl (Dies Natalis, at acoustic guitar) and Cécile Schott (Colleen, reading Proust, obviously), help make some tracks more varied, and Mantas knows how to dose their contribution. @c closes the album with a glitchy, more upbeat remix, which is ok but maybe a bit redundant. I would recommend this disc to anybody into Dead Texan, latest Beequeen or Stephan Mathieu, and melancholic electronica in general – it hardly gets any better than this, me thinks.

Eugenio Maggi

“Uno stordente sogno in musica”, “gli uccelli che dormono nell’aria”, “un giardino ancora silenzioso prima del levarsi del giorno”, sono alcuni dei titoli prelevati dal corpo della “Recherche” di Proust che la musica del portoghese Jorge Mantas alias TBS anela ad evocare. Scaturito nel 2003 da esperimenti personali con computer e minidisc, il progetto trae ispirazione da una varietà di stimoli culturali, dalla pittura di Dante Gabriel Rossetti al cinema di Eric Rohmer, mantenendosi sul filo di un intimismo introspettivo dai risvolti romantici. Con l’aiuto di alcuni ospiti alla chitarra più un intermezzo di passi proustiani letti in francese da Cécile Schott, l’autore si muove su un terreno in cui è facile scivolare nell’estetismo fine a se stesso. L’attenzione di Mantas si focalizza quindi, con esiti discreti ma non essantanti, sulla capacità dei suoi atmosferici soundscape e ambient drone melodici — assemblati al laptop come uno scrittore davanti alla sua macchina da scrivere — di comunicare genuine emozioni con languida e sensuale malinconia. Per citare un altro titolo, “una prova dell’esistenza irriducibilmente individuale dell’anima”.

Vittore Baroni

Very delicate drones, fluctuating atmospheres, rarefied ambient scores and glitches, fragments of a literary universe (Proust’s, in his ‘Récherche’, several times cited as the main source of inspiration by Jorge Mantas, aka The Beautiful Schizophonic), infused in romantic empathy, ‘heart throbs’ and melancholic visions, redundant intimate experiences. A sensitivity that, in the (romanced?) figure of the contemporary laptop composer, ideally immersed into the dark of his room, lost in a ‘plunderphonic’ ecstasy, finds other similarities and elective correspondences. It’s a crystal-clear and sensual production, enriched by the contribution of José Luis Merca and Tobias Strahl, dilated in field recordings, poetic reminiscences (Cecille Schott is ‘La Letrice’), contemporary aesthetics invading the listening experience with pathos and elegance.

Aurelio Cianciotta

In the promotional materials surrounding his new release, Jorge Mantas [aka The Beautiful Schizophonic] says: ”Marcel Proust has been one of the main sources of inspiration to me in the last years. His ideas devoted to the affections of the human heart, his approach deeply rooted on the long literary French tradition in which love can only be lived in sadness, is something that goes much beyond pure aesthetic. So it came only natural that somehow I would try to convey this literary and philosophic interest with the sound aesthetic I pursue. The image of a sleepless solitary writer confined to a Parisian soundproof room, has everything to do with the experience of a modern laptop composer, alone in the dark of a room, in a sort of headphone ecstasy with his acoustic fragments of reality. Both experience loneliness. Both are melancholic dreamers creating from an imaginary memory of the world.“

Let‘s face it, Mantas is a true romantic. Along with Proust, erotic photography and French new wave cinema, he§s hornier than a toad on influences that art has to offer. His music is less romantic than his direct surroundings, but nonetheless, there is an air of softness to what he makes. The drones he manufactures on his laptop and minidisc are illusionary. You think you‘re hearing something but in fact it‘s the constant, reinforcement of the drone in your head that makes you think you‘re hearing something else entirely. Two duos with guitarist Jose Luis Merca are more along the lines of field recordings than anything else. In both cases, guitar‘s unique sounds have been masked over quite well. When he collaborates with Paulo Silva, the effect is symphonic and quite uplifting. One of the more moving numbers is “Dans la chambre magique d‘une sibylle” where Tobias Strahl contributes some nicely flowing acoustic guitar loops. Another stunning piece is “La lectrice”, which features Collen [Cecile Schott] reading Proust in Paris [final piece on the record is a long remix of this very same track as done by @c]. Stunning in its singularity of purpose and loveliness of delivery. As with most things, if you try as hard as Mantas, you‘ll find drones too can be made to sound lovely and inspiring.

Tom Sekowski

Hosted by Jorge Mantas, under the cloak of indulgently named and inclined The Beautiful Schizophonic, comes this assemblage, drenched in a musk of hyper-imagined bedroom-bound longueurs of laptop-lathered longing (mmm, the indulgence is infectious!). Musicamorosa is trailed with the heady referential aromatics of artistic influences ancient and modern. In addition to Proust – about whom he has draped the main fabric of the conceit on which the album is founded, he reels out a parade of writers (Poe, Dante), painters (Friedrich, Waterhouse, Rossetti), moving on up to French new wave cine-auteurs such as Rohmer and Rivette, then their post-modern postcursors Wong Kar-Wai and Sofia Coppola, before clinching the deal with a couple of erotic photographers. This ferment of ideational and sensual lays the ground for the incubation of a veritable wallow in sonic reverie.

The prime sonic strategy underlying The Beautiful Schizophonic is the drone, but that “schizophonic” element brings with it an array of indoor field recordings, sampling and acoustic instruments, laptop-manipulated. Mantas, somewhat preciously perhaps, but no less honestly for the faint reek of pretentiousness that will strike some, purports to be “searching for the sonorization of affective environments that express my deepest innerself.” To which the most immediate response might be: “Aren’t we all?!”, but once you break through the verbiage and the opening sequence drifts in, it sweeps away sardonicism, casting an incantatory spell. Your heart may start to ache and a drowsy numbness may even pain your senses, Keats-like, as if of hemlock you had drunk.

Musicamorosa seeks no less than to patch itself, however obliquely, into Proust’s ideas on the affective life of the heart, rooted in the French tradition of romantic pessimism. The Proust-derived track titles are more suggestive than directorial, and, incidentally, an expressively engaged antidote to the hermetic blankness of much abstract electronica. Mantas draws further linkages between the unquiet solitary writer confined to a Parisian soundproof room and the experience of a modern laptop composer, himself enclosed in his own headphone ecstasy with its fragmentary aur-reality. Both are dream-basing melancholics, the one whose search for temps perdu must live on retrieving scraps of deleted scenes in re-thinks and memory-jags, the other in analogous music-mediated soul searches. Links between love, melancholy and memory are invoked through digitised orchestrations speckled with electro-acoustic shadings. Musicamorosa’s drones are charged with harmonic iridescence, of which the peculiarly pretty-in-pink girlie-cartoon artwork shouldn’t be seen as representative. More than a hint of shadow attends the luminous “un étourdissant réveil en musique”, an aching melancholy t(a)inting its sweetness. “L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur” sounds no less than the subject’s suspension in lovelorn languor turned to dark drowning.

Viewed in the context of a somewhat sullen and spotty debut on night-ocean drones label, Mystery Sea, Musicamorosa can be seen as a more elegant and affective creation – a romancing of the drone. At times it approaches the air of wistful refinement of such as Stars of the Lid or Eluvium. In its more technology-blurred moments, as on the concrète of “les oiseaux qui dorment en l’air” or the gorgeous “cantiques à la gloire du soleil”, the less ascetic of Basinski-believers could be seduced into the beautiful schizophonography secreted on Musicamorosa.

Alan Lockett

In the press sheet sent with this CD, Jorge Mantas states that a primary influence for his music is the literary realm. For this particular album, he has used Marcel Prout’s “La recherhe du temps perdu” as a jumping off point. The track titles are quotations from the book and are meant to convey the loneliness experienced by the French writer as well as the Portuguese musician making these pieces. Oddly, all this is spelled out eloquently in the texts sent to reviewers and distributors but lacking in the CD package itself. It strikes me that had this project been taken on by a Frenchman instead, the work may have been a setting of the texts being read, as so often was done at the INA-GRM and their colleagues. Mantas does include a short reading of the original French by Colleen (Cécile Schott). However, the album focuses on what that artist calls “romantic drones” — something not unlike Maeror Tri‘s past practice. Rather than inspiring literary soliloquies, it seems that this music is likely to cause one to just space out among the swelling chords dripping in reverberation. Even the three tracks which feature guest guitar playing are very soft and dreamy. In this respect, I think it does a fine job of evoking the lonely laptop artist creating his music in isolation. Perhaps this is an ambient emo — the self reflecting artist wishing to show his need to connect with someone. Overall, I have heard things which evoke loneliness better, and I think I may have not reached these conclusions without the added text. Which begs the question of why this was left out= Did this person really think the music would magically convey its intended context with only a few subtle clues? Given the number of people out there who probably haven’t read Proust, I really think the deeper part of this will easily be lost on those who will simply hear this as pleasant ambient album. As such, I really don’t feel this reaches the heights of, or rather the lows of, those whom Jorge cites as influences — among others including Edgar Allen Poe and Wong Kar-Wai. One thing this album lacks is complexity. On the bonus track “Soixant-quatre” @c remixes the work, creating a much more glitchy sound editing ending with a Coil sample and recording of fireworks. It is a contract to the main album mood but does not show any deep involvement with the form of the work. Overall, this is a pleasant album, but not one that displays any distinctive qualities.