@c’s Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom declares its unique character even before a single note is heard. There’s the unusual group name, for starters, and then there’s the album’s four tracks, two of which are under two minutes, and the others twenty and forty. Assembled using studio, live and field recordings, Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom is, in fact, the seventh @c full-length from members Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, and their third on Cr\u00c3\u00b3nica. Carvalhais and Tudela are sonic alchemists who piece together elements into collages of restless, shape-shifting character. In the accompanying notes, they accurately describe themselves as sculptors, explorers, and even watchmakers with the album signifying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153one more step in finding our way in music, looking for something we can’t really define.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In their constructions, Carvalhais and Tudela wrestle with the tension between the recording in its static form as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153finished\u00e2\u20ac\u009d document and the improvisation strategies which they bring to the recording process as a means for liberating sound from the structural foundations of a given composition and that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153finished\u00e2\u20ac\u009d state.<\/p>\n
@c’s explorative spirit is nowhere more evident than in the opening \u00e2\u20ac\u015362\u00e2\u20ac\u009d whose hyperactive flow is somewhat normalized by the inclusion of Miquel Bernat’s percussion playing. Real-world elements likewise ground \u00e2\u20ac\u015371\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u015372\u00e2\u20ac\u009d where dog barks and amplified water are audible in the first, and the decayed grooves of Stephen Mathieu’s 78 RPM discs in the second. Not surprisingly, the album’s coup de grace is \u00e2\u20ac\u015361,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d not simply on account of its length but because it integrates contributions from a huge supporting cast that includes vocalists, percussionists, and a sax player, guitarist, and electric cello player. Don’t think for a moment, however, that \u00e2\u20ac\u015361\u00e2\u20ac\u009d sounds conventional for even a single second; Carvalhais and Tudela treat their guests’ sounds just as malleably as they do their own, making \u00e2\u20ac\u015361\u00e2\u20ac\u009d even more uncompromising than the three pieces before it. The piece is like a huge, multi-limbed alien organism that never stops changing colour and shape while writhing relentlessly and sometimes violently for an exhausting forty minutes. Admittedly, the individual instruments do identifiably assert themselves on occasion\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe cello and kalimba most audibly extricate themselves from the whole\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut more often than not the contributors’ sounds are absorbed into @c’s complex web.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
@c’s Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom declares its unique character even before a single note is heard. There’s the unusual group name, for starters, and then there’s the album’s four tracks, two of which are under two minutes, and the others twenty and forty. Assembled using studio, live and field recordings, Up, Down, Charm, … <\/p>\n