The Cherry Blues Project is a well known two-people-project from Argentina. They have released a handful of works on the excellent Resting Bell netlabel, touching the experimental genre and folk music languages, as well as heavily relying on field recordings to build their works.
'Dead Hours' is their brand new album, a refreshing collection of compositions going well over a hour and covering pretty much all the territories that are familiar to the duo's sound geography. Some pieces are more on the field recordings side, while some others are clearly experimental works, while others yet have distinct folk arrangements and acoustic treatment. There are also some alternative mixes and remixes thrown into the bag, showing that Cherry and Blues are very confortable doing what they do best: designing specific audio environments.
The tone set throughout 'Dead Hours' is obviously dark, sometimes even dark ambient-like, which as far as I know isn't what they are used to do. However they're very convincing doing it, and 'Dead Hours' is a beautifully patchworked album that you shouldn't miss out.
Adrián Juárez is a sound experimentalist from Buenos Aires, Argentina and he has been working with different sound languages since 2005. Not long but he has already spawned an impressive number of solo and collaborative works since then. Adrián works with various genres and sytles, ranging from IDM, vocal music, ambient, post rock and experimental to orchestral music, afro, percusion, latin american folk and others.
'Planicie Corrediza' is one of his most recent works to be filed under improv./experimental, and one that test tube has the immense pleasure to release. With mysterious titles like 'Batanonabitidolac' or 'Cadoltibina', this EP is roughly 25 minutes of pure, unadultered ordinary and out of the ordinary sounds. Adrián uses water and dirt, bubbles and sand, cardboard boxes, wood planks and pieces, acoustic guitars in pure agony, tin cans, plates and glasses, bassdrums, chimes and whistles, voices and throat sounds, PVC tubing and a whole lot more that cannot be effectively described - we can only imagine. This sound architecture results in completely organic non-music, non-compositions, incidentally without any narrative but telling us some kind of story at the same time. Music from the earth, from within a house, from someone else's day or night, music built like a tree-house where we keep adding pieces of wood and metal and found parts and it gets bigger and different and special every time we add something new. Every object has its own life and produces its own distinctive familiar or unfamiliar sound. This is improvisation music made out of unorthodox instruments at its best, and the experience of listening to it is more than special, it's an experience.
Pedro Leitão
Estudios y conocimientos musicales al margen (de los que, a decir verdad, va sobrado), Adrián Juárez se ha caracterizado siempre por poner a prueba su capacidad para generar sonidos más allá de la ortodoxia musical, buscándolos insistentemente donde parece imposible que los haya y, lo más difícil, encontrándolos. Lo ha demostrado en escenarios de todo el mundo, con sus innumerables lanzamientos en sellos y netlabels aquí y allá, y cabía esperar, como es el caso, que volviera a repetir costumbre. Ahí está si no Planicie Corrediza, publicado por el netlabel portugués Test Tube. Tres nuevos temas del argentino donde el agua, el polvo, las burbujas, la arena, el cartón, las latas de hojalata, platos, cristales y un montón de sonidos más se fagocitan, mezclan y confunden con los ecos lejanos e indescifrables de guitarras acústicas en desconcertante e imperceptible suspensión. Un trabajo de arquitectura sonora, entre la música concreta y la improvisación, digno de uno de los mejores y más inspirados compositores experimentales del momento.
Miguel Onofri lives in this Argentinian town called Mendoza, population 876 000, not very far from Chile's border and about 1000m above the sea level, up in the mountain plateau. Pretty far away from everything we know, it seems. Nonetheless, Miguel is an active part of an artistic community of visual artists and musicians - Miguel is also a video artist -, they put up shows and invite guest artists, touring around some towns like Córdoba, and they even started their own Netlabel, SincroWeb.
As a sound artist, Miguel is known as Mezzo, putting his laptop to work on low frequency signals and white noise and drone-based minimal electronica. Harsh stuff, and amazingly well done.
'Ostracismo', although being a very small release, inflicts variable levels of damage to our ears. And it's good.
'Track #01' is a small intro of low frequency clicks and cuts, Ryoji Ikeda style, and is somewhat violent. It takes 59 seconds to go away, 'though. 'Track #02', the longest track in this EP, starts with machine errors, like an electrical generator going berserk, sending SOS signals. Slowly, an underlying drone appears and takes control of the track. The rest is up to you to discover.
'Track #03', another short piece, an interlude-type of thing, is of a dissonant type of sound frequencies, a different kind of error, easier on the ears but also very interesting to explore. 'Track #04' is a personal favorite. It's an emotional drone, unfortunately too small to enjoy to its fullness. 'Track #05' is made of another type of interferences. You could almost visualize the wavefields of data being put out. Again, too damn short to put us in a transe. Awesome release. Now, can I have another 40 minutes of this, please?
«'Untitled' is the first collaborative work between norwegian Andreas Brandal and argentinian Federico Barabino. Brandal on electronics and Barabino on prepared electric guitar. Both of them have a vast background of working with improvised music, which is precisely what you will listen to in this work.
All audio material was recorded between October 2008 and January 2009, and consists on 10 tracks of Brandal's manipulation techniques using various electronic tools, both analogue and digital, over several improvised guitar pieces taped by Barabino in Buenos Aires.
All the pieces have numbers as titles, which have no particular meaning, as they all are random attempts at eviscerating guitar samples, through drone, glitch and noise manipulation.
You'll find pretty much sonic chaos here, but it's lovely chaos in all its glory.»
- Pedro Leitão
