There is quite a story behind this release by @C, the duo of Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais, who are also behind the Cronica Electronica label. The music here is part of a new work for the Exhibitions Pavilion of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (still going until June) and @C are using sound sources by more than fifty musicians with whom the label worked in the last fifteen years, from Alex FX to Yiorgis Sakellariou – to give you the alpha and omega here. If you contributed, and you bet I did, it is a great sport hearing your own samples back in this work. The ‘work’ here is an installation piece, “an area for a multisensory immersive experience that incited a dialogue with the sound objects, the architectural space and its visitors. An infrastructure built from speakers, flooring, light, fragrance, and a hovering frame, set a stage for the creation of a nonlinear, generative and open algorithmic composition for computer and speakers. This area was a pivotal point for listening, but it also steered visitors to move, leaving the ideal listening point and exploring the exhibition space to discover how different perspectives over the sonic matter could be attained through its traversal” (sorry for the long quote, but couldn’t have said it better myself). The fifty artists supplied 300 smaller and bigger sounds and the two twenty-six minute pieces on this cassette use the generative system used in the installation but intended to be independent compositions. Both pieces are a myriad of sounds, tumbling and falling together and it sounds like the best of @C (even when it has surely been a while since I last heard their music). It is not easy to find a narrative in here, a guide, a line or whatever, as at times it is some wild chaos, but as a stream of consciousness, it works quite well. On the other side we find “Repetição” (Repetition), which has texts from “Le solfège de l’objetsonore” (Music Theory of the Sound Object), and Pierre Henry’s “House of Sounds”, also spaces concerning sound. Here the text is incorporated in the music and while some of the chaos remains, the modern version of musique concrete, there is more sense of spacing (pun perhaps intended) and it makes a great narrative that allows you not to pay too much attention to the voices. In here I recognized some voices of a then four-year-old year girl, who played a part on one of the earliest releases on this label, and who is now some sixteen years older. Times flies indeed. This is quite a successful release, most enjoyable. (FdW)
Artists who produce instrumental music – or to put it more precisely, music that doesn’t feature vocals – are often asked how they decide on titles. At the risk of sounding elitist, that always struck me as one of the dumber questions in music journalism. Sure, not all music lends itself naturally to a pithy title. But obviously the absence of lyrics doesn’t render the artist incapable of describing what he or she set out to communicate.
A new split disc by Francisco López and Miguel A. GarcÃa appears to have struck a compromise. The album’s title Ekkert Nafn translates as “No Name.†Here’s to pragmatism.
The first piece, “Untitled #351,†is composed by López. The artist has built an impressive body of sound art and experimental music over four decades. López’s work has been enthusiastically received in more than 70 countries. He’s received four honourable mentions at the Ars Electronica Festival competition, and a Qwartz Award for best sound anthology.
This new work has an industrial feel. His source material is largely metallic and abrasive. Those sounds are processed, and then offset with stretches of quiet, or even silence. These breaks temper the overall harshness of the piece. But they also add tension, as we wait apprehensively for what comes next.
The second half of the disc features GarcÃa’s “Applainessads.†Also known as Xedh, the Bilbao, Spain-based sound artist is best known for his work in electroacoustic composition and improvisation. GarcÃa has performed his work in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. He’s also appeared on more than 100 recordings.
“Applainessads†hums like hydro wires stretched over an open field. After a kind of white-noise opening, the piece turns increasingly minimalist as its 28 ½ minutes plays out. The effect is serene, but not quite comforting.
The two works complement one another nicely. Both feature sounds associated with the 20th century, processed with the intention of producing 21st century art. At the same time, there are sufficient differences between the two to make the shared album work.
The evolving ease of “Applainessads†is a welcome response to the tension built up by “Untitled #351.†GarcÃa’s fluidity is an absorbing contrast to López’s banging stops and starts. Kevin Press
Just two tracks, “Gâ€, twenty minutes long, and “Sâ€, thirty-three minutes and thirty-six seconds. It’s this the debut of the duo LuÃs Antero e Darius ÄŒiuta for Crónica. The album is the result of a very personal exploratory process that seems to question the intimate and abstract nature of the sounds. As a result, the album has a double aspect, sound and graphics, but it has the same kind of information. With Soundwe are almost close to the perception limits of the human ear, despite there are many low frequencies, somebody would be able to hear them. Sounds who are really heard and sounds who are just presumed sum up together, giving the result to increase the perception and also our capability to imagine vibrational phenomena. Fritjof Capra explained that “the subatomic particles and all the matter they form, including our cells, tissues and bodies, are made by frames of activities, rather than thingsâ€, and all the matter is energy existing as vibration. No sound is possible without vibrational phenomena, as the sound needs some means (generally the air or another elastic vector) and a source. The number of times this vibrational movement is being repeated during the time, it’s called frequency. Always around us there are sounds emissions of every kind, you just need to have some perception of them, or amplify the volume of what is infinitesimal. In this case we simply used some good headphones, because even with some top computers speakers it would have been hard to recognize something. What comes out (from the headphones) is a buzz that is more intense and soft in “Gâ€, with frequencies mostly low, whereas in “S†the vibes seem to be more close, maybe because the frequencies are even lower than in the first track and it’s necessary to push them to get more clear. We are here facing some very extreme listening experiences, that might lead to meditation states only if you let yourself go and you want to do it getting lost in a hypnotic, minimal and continuous movement. The duo doesn’t make any discount and the pleasure of the experience can be mediated only if you take the full responsibility of listening. As W.S. Borroughs said, “you can’t just go to the dessert, darlingâ€. To enjoy something, you must be there. Aurelio Cianciotta
The collaborative album Ekkert Nafn was composed from sound materials collected by Francisco López and Miguel A. GarcÃa. Some of these materials were derived from field recordings, others from electrical and mechanical devices, all were manipulated with digital tools to varying degrees. After compiling the collection of sounds, both artists proceeded to compose independently, arriving to pieces that inevitably intersected each other’s aesthetics. In the two chimeric works presented in this album, we may recognise each artist’s authorial identity intertwined with the other’s in multiple and surprising ways. The title of the release is actually yet another manifestation of this superposition: GarcÃa often uses invented words to title his pieces, looking for sounds and forms that somehow connect with the music. Sometimes, within these invented words, he discovers words from languages he does not understand. Ekkert Nafn happens to not be made up of invented words — although it could have been — but is composed by two Icelandic words that translate to the quintessential López title, No Name.
Francisco López is internationally recognised as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For forty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has hundreds of concerts, projects, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries of the six continents. His extensive catalog of sound works has been published worldwide, including live and studio collaborations with hundreds of international artists. He has been awarded four times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival and is the recipient of a Qwartz Award for best sound anthology.
Miguel A. GarcÃa (aka Xedh) is a restless sound artist living in Bilbao. Trained in Fine Arts, he works on electroacoustic composition and improvisation, using sources obtained from the manipulation of electrical devices, sometimes mixing these with sounds of acoustic instruments and field recordings. He has performed extensively across Europe, America and Asia, and appeared on more than a hundred albums. He is also part of the coordination of Hotsetan en Azkuna Zentroa, founder of Klub Larraskito, and director of the Zarata Fest festival, all of them platforms for the diffusion of risky music and related disciplines.
Minimalist accordion tones from Isabel Latorre and Edu Comelles on their cassette tape For Pauline (CRÓNICA 144-2018). As readers may have guessed, it’s inspired directly by the music of Pauline Oliveros, herself now regarded as one of the “greats†of American minimalism and feted for her innovative empowering ideas and sensitive performing skills. The work was intended as a realisation of Oliveros’ deep listening philosophy, but the project gained extra poignancy when Pauline Oliveros died and the musicians decided to turn it into a tribute recording. On Side A, Isabel Latorre plays live at a music festival in 2017, while on the B side we have a composition by Edu Comelles called ‘La Isla Plana’ based on Latorre’s recordings. Latorre’s side feels sketchy and wispy to me, but at least it has a certain spontaneity, as she strives to match the gift for intuition that was one of Oliveros’ hallmarks. Comelles’s piece is more structured, but mostly flat and uneventful nonetheless. Still, you can discern the breathing lungs of the accordion layered into this piece of processed minimalism. Ed Pinsent
Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais have been working as @c since 2000, publishing several albums (some of which in Crónica), composing music for audiovisuals and theatre, performing extensively, and creating site-specific sound installations.
Having been invited to develop a new work for the Exhibitions Pavilion of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, to be shown from March to June 2018, around the time of the 15th anniversary of Crónica, they decided to develop a piece that would involve and reflect the label and the artists with whom it works.
Anotações Sonoras: Espaço, Pausa, Repetição (Sonic Annotations: Space, Pause, Repetition) was developed from sound objects provided by more than fifty artists and projects. The installation established an area for a multisensory immersive experience that incited a dialogue with the sound objects, the architectural space and its visitors. An infrastructure built from speakers, flooring, light, fragrance, and a hovering frame, set a stage for the creation of a nonlinear, generative and open algorithmic composition for computer and speakers. This area was a pivotal point for listening, but it also steered visitors to move, leaving the ideal listening point and exploring the exhibition space to discover how different perspectives over the sonic matter could be attained through its traversal.
The installation was built from the exhibition space and from the idiosyncrasies and autonomy of the more than 300 sound objects that were collected, ranging in duration from under a second to more than an hour. From these, Tudela and Carvalhais developed in excess of one thousand individual sound objects and developed a physical and computational system that fuelled their anarchic autonomy, and stimulated several relationships: between different sound objects; between sound objects and space; between sound objects, space, and listeners.
In this site-specific installation Tudela and Carvalhais developed music that was not projected into an environment, that was not about an environment but that rather was the environment. A music that created its own space, to which it then directed the attention of visitors, so that they were led to develop a holistic reading and interpretation of the work. They developed a music of metaphors, by using sound objects and their qualities to create new objects that serendipitously emerged during the running of the installation. Fleeting objects that could be heard by visitors or could be forever lost.
The two pieces in this release were composed using the sound objects and the generative system from the installation. They are not intended as documentation of the installation, but rather aim at being listened to as new compositions created from, and after, the installation. The first piece, Espaço, Pausa (Space, Pause), is perhaps closer to the dynamics of the opening configuration of the installation, with clearly recognisable sound objects and a focus on their articulation and relationships. The second piece, Repetição (Repetition), is infused with texts in English and Portuguese that were inspired by two other spaces: Pierre Schaeffer’s monumental Le solfège de l’objet sonore (Music Theory of the Sound Object), and Pierre Henry’s House of Sounds, as documented in the photo-book by Geir Egil Bergjord (published by gilka.no). Poetically indexing sound objects, Repetição proposes their semantic reinterpretation, further extending the metaphorical constructs.
Anotações Sonoras: Espaço, Pausa, Repetição (Sonic Annotations: Space, Pause, Repetition), an installation by Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais was commissioned by oMuseu and the Exhibitions Office of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto for its Exhibitions Pavilion. March 24th to June 30th, 2018.
