Basalto

the black rocks resulting from lava, the music is hard, organic, ungiving, harsh and structured around a tonal center without much variation except for the timbral shifts grinding like tectonic plates under severe pressure, yet without any hope to get release from the relentless tension. Ernesto Rodrigues plays octave viola and baritone viola, Abdul Moimême is on electric guitar and Antez plays percussion, although it is hard to identify what sounds come from which instrument on the two long tracks. The music creates a sonic universe that is broad and deep, giving something fundamental and strange, like the status of our planet even before life came to be, when only rocks and water and air and fire were fighting slowly and majestically and unavoidably for their own space.

http://www.freejazzblog.org/2017


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Malasana

The first item’s a group coalition, featuring Antez, Mathieu Calleja, García and Artur Vidal, calling themselves Malasaña for this outing. Malasaña is a thriving part of Madrid which can safely claim to be as hip as the Lower East Side, Brixton Market and Brighton’s Trafalgar Street put together. More to the point, it has a proud history of “unrest and civil disobedience”, going back to the time of Goya. In this hymn to the glories of the fallen of Malasaña, two percussionists, electronic fizz, and a saxophone are used; it’s like a slower and colder version of AMM with added digital scrunch, but the team gradually begin to thaw out and deposit huge chunks of ice in the frozen waters. These long and portentous groaning tones, with a lot of metallic flavour in mix, tend to create the impression of solemn cranes hauling bundles of stern frowning men from the cargo hold of a gigantic container ship onto the harbourside. There’s a world shortage of “seriousness” now; poorer countries have to import it in bulk, conforming to international trade agreements, or even worse they must attempt to smuggle it in.

The Sound Projector.04/05/2015