Ocupa #3 is an event focused on electronic music and the digital arts. On December 15th, a program of talks and performances will take place at gnration, in Braga. Miguel Carvalhais, Rui Penha, and Alberto Simões will discuss Artificial Intelligence and Art, while Pedro Tudela, Roly Porter, and Filipe Lopes will focus on Performance in Electronic Music. Starts at 16h30, free entrance.
Clube de Inverno
For three days, Crónica be heading gnration’s Clube de Inverno, an informal meeting place to explore and improvise with music, sound, image and video.
15 years of Crónica at ZDB, Lisbon
Next Friday, November 30, Crónica will take over the stage at ZDB, in Lisbon, to present the last of the anniversary performances for 2018. SÃria, VÃtor Joaquim, and @c (Pedro Tudela & Miguel Carvalhais) start at 22h at Rua da Barroca 59.
New release: Isabel Latorre & Edu Comelles’s “For Paulineâ€
Valencian accordionist and composer Isabel Latorre and sound artist Edu Comelles met in 2016 working on a third-party project. During that process Comelles recorded some samples of Isabel’s instrument.
A few months later, before Pauline Oliveros passed away, Comelles commissioned Latorre a concert meant to be a free musical interpretation of Oliveros’s Deep Listening theories and philosophy. The commission was meant to be premièred at the Ensems Festival 2017 curated by Comelles.
In November 2016, news broke of the demise of Oliveros. What at first was a compositional commission became something else, a very special tribute.
Latorre kept working and immersing herself, physically and emotionally, into the ideas and philosophy of Oliveros, delivering a heartfelt concert, whose testimony is side A of this tape.
By the same time, Comelles worked on a new composition arising from the 2016 recordings of Latorre. Inspired and encouraged by her concert, he finished La Isla Plana by the end of 2017.
Both pieces are the outcome of two parallel and uncoordinated creative processes that became something else altogether: a tribute, an inspiration, and a farewell homage to one of the most influential musicians of the last century.
Tracklist:
- Isabel Latorre: Isabel Latorre Plays Pauline Oliveros (Live recording 27.05.2017) (21:53)
- Edu Comelles: La Isla Plana (24:10)
Isabel Latorre Plays Pauline Oliveros: Composed, performed and premièred by Isabel Latorre at the Dormitory Room of El Carmen Monastery (now CCC) during Ensems Festival 2017 in Valencia. Recorded by Edu Comelles. La Isla Plana: Composed and arranged by Edu Comelles using a Shruti Box and accordion samples performed by Isabel Latorre. Valencia 2017. Mastered by MC. Cover photo by Paula Felipe.
For Pauline is available as a limited-release tape and as a download.
“Praxis†reviewed by Fluid Sonic Fluctuations
Hello everyone, it’s time for another review in my by now monthly Crónica review series. This time we got this excellent album called Praxis by Cem Güney. This is a release on CD packaged in a three panel cardboard gatefold sleeve in which the CD is beautifully housed between two holes and which features sweet artwork on both sides as well as the tracklist and credits. The package is stored in a resealable plastic sleeve so you can store the release neatly after listening, very nice.
Praxis is a curious album of electro-acoustic, sound collage and sound art that while I was listening to it sounded quite like an album split in two sides of music. It’s got a pretty clear first half that is “bright†in a way, with the second half being “darker†I noticed. The album kicks off with this excellent piece called A Phonetic Theme which cuts from vocal samples to various other manipulated noise, music, glitches, field recordings in quite a dadaist sound collage kind of manner, really creative and enjoyable piece, pretty funny too, with one man saying “vinegar†at one point. Great glitching and timestretch effects in this one too, Güney goes pretty wild in here. Impulse is a much more gradual piece which features a lot of high pitched sounds, included sine wave beeps, clicking and shaking sounds, as well as a mysterious vibrating repeated motive, stuttered music samples and glitches and various other sounds popping up and then disappearing after some time. What I like about this kind of style is that the progression is pretty slow over time but there’s a lot of sonic colours in the music and it’s got this wild quirky vibe, feeling a bit like the lab of some mad genius professor. Undulations (dedicated to Janek Schaefer) starts of pretty dramatic with a looped vinyl music sample with a lot of tasty crackle sounds added in the mixture too but then moves to a lighter funkier kind of bright drone, in the beginning still accompanied by the vinyl crackles. What makes this drone so funky is the squelchy filter bass synth that’s accompanying the drone with varying tones, alongside the drone all kinds of harmonic and diffuse sounds float in and out including a great resonant “sequenced†resonant series, whooshing sounds as well as field recordings that pop up only once or twice, like the genius addition of the shop P.A. attention sound added at one point in the piece. With the mechanical industrial like sounds in the mixture the track feels quite like the sonic picture of a relaxed day in some workshop where people work wih various kinds of machinery. very peaceful. Visceral (In A Figurative Sense) is more similar to the atmosphere of Impulse combined with a more Industrial edge, an organ / synth drone combined with various high pitched clicks and bloops as well as more machinery sounds, a quirky and playful soundscape of a workshop, nice sound. Factitious Phobia features a very nice low rumbling bass that starts off as these intense “beats†that fade in and sped up making up the very low bass sound of the track. This track can definitely already be seen as a start of the darker side of this album, featuring a more mysterious and abstract atmosphere, a focus more on sound textures and sonic manipulations than melodic content. The piece features various metallic and clicking sounds this time more ear-penetrating and a bit more harsh in the metallic side of it, another interesting element is the Turkish (?) music radio samples that pop up in the mixture at some point and while the delay piano notes near the end of the piece sound pretty funny the piece is still in darker territory than the tracks before, it still feels like a metal workshop setting though, but this changes in the tracks to come. Adaptations features many high frequency sounds, sometimes at earpiercing frequency and is based around a “hovering†mid frequency drone, a theme in the track seems to be space and astronauts as there are also some samples used from an astronauts communication system. Adaptations of more a sound art kind of piece with a lot of emphasis on the high and mid frequency manipulation of sounds to create new spacy and also crunchy sonic shapes, mysterious and intense on the ears, cool stuff. Praxis continues in this style with a lot of high frequency manipulation and LFO manipulation all abound in this piece, a very physical experience of sound, great track. Behold Now Bhikkus, The Sounds of Nada Yoga features a sound that is more like a meditative religious ritual with the extended male vocal choir samples drone in the drone, this is accompanied however by chopped and glitched vocal samples and buzzing manipulated sounds and another second resonant drone that comes in in the second half of the track, mysterious and dark music again, but very nice. Somewhere Between The Middle is more sonic manipulation again, though much longer and with more layers and progression, there’s a mixture of various sounds used, field recording samples (including a pitched up car wiper), delay time / feedback manipulation and other synthetic and organic sounds, all accompanied by a mid frequency drone. Very nice piece again full of curious sonic adventure to dive into and nice closing piece of the album.
Praxis by Cem Güney is a varied and especially playful album of experimental music that goes through both light and darker ambience and creative sonic manipulation over 9 exciting tracks. The music follows a refreshing less “planned sounding†approach to experimentalism and conjurs up plenty of fun sonic imagery as well as delivers intense physical experiences of sound. A varied and nice collection of music, recommended listen. Orlando Laman
Tamtam’s “Rheingold†reviewed by Toneshift
Such is the stature of ‘Des Ring Der Nibelungen’ that even the mildest utterance of Rheingold feels somewhat brazen, a laden-thrust to the overbearing musical resonance that word conjures: yet Tamtam’s work is entirely antithetical to the Wagner opera with which it shares a moniker. Based upon hydrophone recordings of the Rhine River, the listener is proffered an enchanting yet infinitely subtle world, a shifting, creaking mass that is amorphous by design. The source material serves both as a conceptual bed and compositional framework – the entire piece feels like a river, unfolding in waves of sound that build without drama, marking the mind with only the faintest trace upon their inevitable retreat. It is a highly evocative, highly visual work, and one that benefits from volume – under the right listening conditions you can almost imagine your body prostrated along the rivers bank, engulfed in the monotonous lap of water upon the bow of a boat.
This is in no sense a purist’s approach to field-recording, however. Whilst the recordings lack any overt processing, the inclusion of gong and electric bass accent and oppose the natural rhythms and timbres on offer, underscoring the soft crescendo’s that serve as the piece’s only real structural unity. The recordings are treated with a notable reverence, and whilst scrapes and drones of the instrumentation offer a broader and more defined musical palette, their performance is always secondary to the underlying qualities of the river, the repetitive, emergent motion of water.
As an album, Rheingold is perhaps boring – assuming we can for a moment reclaim that word, to remove its negative connotation and presume that, as with the work of La Monte Young, it points to an active capacity to exist beyond the border of interest or sense, a space of higher, transcendental engagement. Indeed, Tamtam’s work is reminiscent of Young’s, even as it invokes wildly different sonic materials – it carries the same focus on the microscopic, the same approach to temporality that forces its listener to abandon any comprehension of the piece as a whole. Every moment is lavishly ill-defined, a holistic experience that cannot be broken down into meaningful, free-standing parts. And whilst terms such as ‘organic’ or ‘sublime’ are used so frequently as to render them near-impotent, Tamtam’s work captures the vitality, the living presence of a physical location in a way few more straight-forward field-recordings can master. The sparse and textural instrumentation is embedded to completely into the Rheine that what emerges is a near seamless divination of composer and source, performer and site.
In addition to the main piece, the album offers three remixes, or perhaps, revisions, of the material. The first of these, Eosin’s ‘Erda’, eschews the dynamic, undulating life of its source material in favour of far more clinical, cold imagining that, if it lacks the inherent beauty of its source, is efficient and powerful none the less. Static to a fault, Eosin’s version adds layers of glitch and percussion that, rather than advancing the composition, seem to lock the listener into a not altogether pleasant funk, a faintly industrial soundscape that brings to mind the more textural work of Z’ev. Maile Corbert offers a restrained interpretation with ‘TamTam Tuning’, a work that seems at first so close to the original that it could almost be the same piece.
As it progresses, however, it becomes clear that there is some unusual, pronounced processing at play – some sort of phase or frequency alterations that steer the work in a new direction, without ever forcing its own footprint too firmly upon it. Embracing a sense of disorientation beyond the cyclical, repeating waves of its predecessor, Corbert adds a certain futuristic bent, as if the Rhine now sits as the backdrop to a Tarkovsky film, a somewhat alien, if no less organic, being. Finally, ‘Einhundertvierundzwanzig’ is the albums only remix proper, invoking a markedly different aesthetic and intent. Electronic percussion, spectral processing, and the use of samples, make for a buzzy, digital affair that somewhat squanders the source material – whilst not unpleasant, it is hard to see how his adds anything to the endeavour, with a final movement that feels utterly incongruous to the project as a whole.
This slight quibble aside, Rheingold is a wonderful, immersive listen, whose reverence to its source is such that it inhabits a uniquely unspectacular sound world, a beautiful, discreet, and texturally-rich tapestry that perfectly encapsulates and explores, in its own quiet fashion, the inherent life of the river from which it draws inspiration. Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
via Toneshift
SÃria’s “Cuspo†reviewed by Groove
Die Ebenen des Dazwischen sind Orte von Geistern und Erinnerung. Besonders heimgesucht sind Klänge aus obsoleten (im Tech-Jargon: obsoleszenten) Tonträgerformaten wie Schellackplatten oder Chromdioxid-Kassetten. Die aus und mit diesen Medien produzierten „hauntologischen“ Inhalte spiegeln Stimmungen von nostalgisch, melancholisch und morbide bis hin zu düster und unheimlich. Diana Combo aus Porto hat sich unter dem Alias Eosin auf genau solche konzeptuell appropriierenden, hauntologische Klänge aus alten Schellack- und Vinylplatten spazialisisert. Das Tape Cuspo (Crónica) unter Combos anderem Alias SÃria führt den dunklen Spuk in das Territorium von Indie-Ambient à la Grouper oder Ekin Fil, also eine Lo-Fi Produktion, viel Hall auf Stimme und Instrumenten sowie ein rauschender und knisternder alter Analogsynthesizer als Soundbasis. Also düstere und introvertiert-verschreckte minimalistische Folksongs aufgenommen mit einer 4-Spur-Bandmaschine im Schwimmbad zwei Häuser weiter. Frank P. Eckert
via Groove
“For Pauline†reviewed by Fluid Sonic Fluctuations
Hello, I’m excited to present to you my first advance review on this blog of an upcoming release, in this case on CRÓNICA. This is the new Limited Edition Cassette and Digital Album release by ISABEL LATORRE & EDU COMELLES titled FOR PAULINE, it will be released on both formats on November 20, but I can give you all an advance review of what you can expect from this excellent new 47 minute tape. The version I’m reviewing here is the promo version of the Digital Album, which is in 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality and comes with the cover art in good resolution as well as a promo PDF file detailing the release.
FOR PAULINE is a tape which became a tribute to legendary American composer, accordionist and experimental music artist Pauline Oliveros who passed away in 2016. As written in the PDF file, the first piece Isabel Latorre Plays Pauline Oliveros (Live recording 27.05.2017) is a live recording by EDU COMELLES of ISABEL LATORRE’S performance at Ensems Festival 2017 in which she interpreted Oliveros’ Deep Listening theories and philosphy. The piece was commissioned by COMELLES in 2016, but when Oliveros’ passed away in November of that year, the music suddenly became a tribute to her. And, indeed the piece is a really well fitting tribute, full of intense resonating tones and harmonics, tonal tension and occasional dissonance. LATORRE’S accordion at points sounds almost electronic, at other times purely acoustic and organic. In waves the piece floats, progresses, rises and falls full of rich textures, sometimes whirring like electrity, the accordion fluttering around a sharp drone. The music builds to a tense cloud of dissonance until it falls into silence and in the second half builds from the sounds of air flowing throw the accordion to a stretched drone accompanied by LATORRE’s voice. There’s some lovely phasing going on in the resonances and harmonics within the accordion’s wave of drone, giving it a texture that’s both sharp and flowing, the drone moves forward with more diffuse noisy accordion mechanics sounds waving through the drone like wind rattling leaves of trees. The drone then fades out into quiet soft high harmonics, into a quiet sonic feeling of piece. A very good performance, which definitely also recalled a lot of Oliveros’ works with resonances and harmonics fluctating and mixing as can be heard in the electronic pieces on Important Records’ box set Reverberations. La Isla Plana is the piece by EDU COMELLES, created using samples of LATORRE’s accordion, as well as a Shruti box. Just like the first track, it’s an intensely droning piece, though this one is a bit more continous in its progression and there’s more gradual flow to it. The drone features acoustic tones but also tones that are slightly glitched up in the mixture. It’s a pretty jumpy way of glitching but it works. The first half blends in all these sounds in various harmonic combinations, waves flowing like the see. Acoustic and electronic manipulation blended into a subtle sharp glow of rich sonics. The second half fades into one melodic pattern that gets repeated as a focus and keeps building the sonics on this, with waves of hissing noisy sound and sharper phasing drone fading into the foreground, the sound image also gets deeper and wider in this second half, very impressive, captivating and entrancing drone that tightly grips you in a gorgeous cloud of sound. The piece also ends in a soft ambience of phasing harmonics, almost fading into just one note of the drone mixture, all out into the distance. Awesome piece.
FOR PAULINE perfectly encapsulates Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening concepts and experimentation with natural and modified resonances into an enjoyable and deep listening experience of excellent electro-acoustic music. It’s a tape release of music that Olveros herself would have definitely loved herself too, I feel and is a great work that continues the legacy of research, experimentation and music with which Oliveros inspired many musicians. An excellent recommended tape. Orlando Laman
“Roha†reviewed by Gonzo Circus
Gewoonlijk gaat Andreas Trobollowitsch voor zijn composities uit van eerder opgenomen improvisaties – met instrumenten en voorwerpen – en ‘gevonden geluiden’. Dat deed hij bijvoorbeeld bij eerdere albums (met de duo’s Nörz en Acker Velvet) en dat doet hij ook bij zijn solowerkstuk ‘Roha’. Ditmaal schijnen de voorafgaande improvisaties en gevonden geluiden echter vrij rechtstreeks, ‘ruwer’ op de plaat te zijn beland. ‘Roha’ ademt in elk geval een sfeer van experiment en speels uitproberen. Dat betekent ook dat ‘Roha’ de indruk wekt eerder een verzameling losse geluidsonderzoeken te zijn, dan een album met een logische opbouw in composities. Dat is overigens geen kritische veroordeling. Hij presenteert ons een album vol ideeën, helder in hun beperking, zich telkens zich richtend op het detail. De ene compositie bestaat uit een repeterend loopje en willekeurig geplaatste klanken en klinkt als een moeizaam, met gepuf en gekraak voortploegende machine; een volgende keer vormt een metalig geratel een dichte, snerpende drone. Metalige slagen en snelle pulsen vormen een industriële compositie, die humoristisch eindigt als een afslaande motor; snaren en toetsen van een (geprepareerde of kapotte?) piano leveren een herhalend lijntje en een gebrekkige melodie, langzaam oplossend in een geluidsbrei. ‘Roha’ pakt, in zijn afwisseling, uit als een consistent album met plezierige, mooie, kleine en vooral dwarse composities. Trobollowitsch nodigt uit tot herhaald beluisteren en verkennen.
via Gonzo Circus
“Ification†reviewed by Fluid Sonic Fluctuations
Hi everyone, this is the last part of my Crónica review series (for now). Today I’m putting the focus on this 2008 album by Pure called Ification. The album is again presented in the same 16-bit/44.1kHz sound quality as the physical CD release and includes the album cover in good resolution and PDF file with album details and credits of course.
Ification is a much shorter album than the previous releases I reviewed, although its 58 minutes running time is still longer than average and I definitely had a good listening experience with this album. Over the 7 album tracks Pure’s music crosses various genres like Noise, Dark Ambient and electro-acoustic music. It’s definitely an interesting mixture of sonic textures and rhythms on this album but there’s also a good cohesion in the music as there’s a recurring theme of manipulated acoustic or electric instruments that binds all tracks together into a whole. First track Fire is a curious one, chopped up blocks of guitar Noise chords in an unpredictable rhythm. It’s pretty barebones, minimal and short but still a fun piece to start with. Second track After the Bomb dives into much more atmospheric territory with reversed pads that sound like run through an MP3 compression filter. The piece slowly builds as a drone, high frequency blips fade in and soft sirens can be heard. Then ringmodulated manipulated drums come in, playing in an improvised way. Amongst these are also bursts of Noise, not very harsh but definitely noticable elements of crackling texture. It definitely feels like a situation of uncertainty, if we take the track title After the Bomb, less like terror after a bomb would go off but more like this feeling of uncertainty. An intriguing piece that flows very smoothly in this unique mixture of sounds. Approximation follows, a piece that does sound a bit like a Contemporary Classical composition with the low horns and high glassyy string like sounds. A pretty mysterious droning piece that varies constantly between two or three chords, there’s some dark percussion in here as well. It definitely gives off a tense feel but also shows a bit of the low point I found about some tracks on this album. This low point is the sometimes slightly confusing structure of the tracks, so in the case of Approximation the way the music progresses feels a bit vague to me at some points. The low horns, high string sounds that are sometimes in upwards and downwards waves in frequency are combined and follow eachother but don’t feel entirely connected in what sounds they make. Fortunately though this confusion is reduced by the abstraction inherent in the music, so while I couldn’t follow where the music was going in some of the tracks, the atmosphere and vibe the textures give off is still inspiring and captivating to get into. Blind Flight is a darker piece that besides drone also features quite a lot more Noise. The piece is more continous going from a hollow metallic drone to crunchy whining Noise with Industrial overtones. The piece then moves towards tense string ambience in which the Noise fades back in, crackling even more, buzzing like a big Industrial turbine hall towards a metallic ending. Sonomatopeia features vocals by Alexandra von Bolzn and features a lot excellent synth and Noise experimentation in a frightening high frequency drench cloud of sound. The piece moves from glassy and buzzing to diffuse Noise into sharp synth drone ending with heavily distorted and flanged Noise. The vocals are mostly textural experiments Alexandra does with her mouth, in the end culminating in some distorted wordless screams. It’s not the most extreme kind of vocals I’ve heard but they definitely do add a nice organic, alien kind of texture and tension to the music, nice. Next track End, is a long Drone piece that has this lovely diffuse resonating and ticking beginning that’s very deep and moves into a distorted and buzzing drone. The buzzing is nicely low and intense on the ears. Cool thing is that this drone actually shifts to a different tone not too long before half-way into the piece, only establishing the pitch of the piece after some time. This sharp drone then gets accompanied by washy distant percussion and metal resonance. The drone sometimes goes gets filtered with a Low Pass Filter of its high frequencies to focus more on the background and then goes back into sharpness again. Again very mysterious and dark music that develops gradually but also really keeps a great deep distant spacial soundscape going. And that is also what I like about a lot of the music on this album too, the space caused by the reverb on the piece gives the music a more distant and deep sound that can still be equally harsh but also gives more of a feeling of a huge or infitely big space these sounds move in. Iron Sky is the final piece and it’s the noisiest one. Kicking off with a section of excellent rhythmic noise choppy rhythms made up of distorted noise and heavily distorted acoustic drums the piece gets into harsh screeching Noise mayhem full of high frequency crunch, punchy drums with quite some bass in the kick. The last three minutes of the piece are particularly harsh and intense, an awesome chaos of Noise waves mixed with heavily modulated acoustic instruments. An explosive and fiery finale to the album.
Ification by Pure is an often dark album of electro-acoustic Drone and Noise infused music. It’s an experience that could perhaps use some more structure in the composition ocassionally but this is made up for with an excellent original sonic signature sound by Pure. An enjoyable and thrilling varied ride through dark sonics for anyone looking for experimental music with a deeper, darker and more live feel to it. Orlando Laman