“Musicamorosa” reviewed by Furthernoise

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

“Musicamorosa” reviewed by Bixobal

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.