Mist & Poetry - From Art-Star

DURAND'S FLOWERS

Approximately two weeks ago, as I was looking through some boxes in my parents’ house on a rainy late afternoon, I stumbled across pictures of my parents when they were young and a couple more of my sister and me, in various poses, awful outfits (what was our mother thinking?) and diverse places; through the laughter for the absurdity of some moments captured on 35mm (us with matching hats, me running, age four or five, half-naked through a field of weeds holding a stray cat under my arm) I also let some tears escape, realising that childhood memories, or things we thought we’d forgotten and lost forever, are some of the most bittersweet we are to encounter in life.

Federico Durand‘s album El éxtasis de las flores pequeñas, out today on Own Records, is a little bit like that. Recorded in Argentina, mixing acoustic instruments, piano, and field recordings, it is a journey towards the memories of his childhood, a way to press pause and rewind.

By "Girl"

From Art-Star

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Thank you deeply "Girl" for this words. It means a lot to me,

F.

Review @ Nillson (Germany)

Own Records begibt sich wieder in die Weiten der menschlichen Seele, der Gefühligkeit und der Fantasie. Der Argentinier Federico Durand darf der Mediator sein. „El Éxtasis De Las Flores Pequenas“ erzählt musikalisch von einer Reise aus seiner Kindheit in die Wälder Südargentiniens, in die freie, unberührte Natur, mit seinen geliebten Großeltern. Das ist offensichtlich eine der schönsten Phasen seines Lebens gewesen. Man kann das förmlich fühlen, in jeder Sekunde seiner innigen Klangcollage, in der sich zarteste Klavier- und Gitarrentupfer und synthetische Soundscapes vor plätscherndem Regen und allerlei anderen Naturgeräuschen wie Momentaufnahmen umeinander bewegen und Bilder vor dem inneren Auge erscheinen lassen. Federico Durand hat Erinnerungen mit Klängen assoziiert und schafft eine einzigartige Heimeligkeit. Wenn auf dem Eröffnungsstück „El Pequeno Huesped Sigue Dormido“ aus dem Hintergrund ein Husten zu vernehmen ist, blickt man mit Durand zusammen aus dem Fenster in die Ferne, fühlt sich zuhause und geborgen wie in der Obhut einer Person, bei der man sich gut aufgehoben gefühlt hat als man noch klein war. „Los Ninos Escriben Poemas En Tiras De Papel Rojo“ ist mit schemenhaft wahrnehmbarem Vogelgezwitscher und aufgeregten Kinderstimmen wie ein Spaziergang durch eine stille Landschaft, eine Reise zu sich selber, in sein Innerstes; aus einer Zeit, in der für einen selbst noch alles groß, faszinierend und aufregend war, was draußen passiert ist. Und „Elin“ trägt eine kleine Melodie – übrigens die einzige wirkliche Melodie des ganzen Albums – noch tagelang hinter uns her.

Naturromantik; Traumreisen: völlig unumwunden bleibt, dass man für solch ein Album als Zuhörer gemacht sein muss. Eine nicht unbeträchtliche Menge Musikmenschen wird „El Éxtasis De Las Flores Pequenas“ ohne Frage als Eso-Kitsch abtun. Dieses scheinbar lethargische; die Tatsache, dass hier eigentlich musikalisch nichts augenfällig großartiges passiert, muss man zu nehmen wissen: als den Wunsch eines Künstlers, seine Gedanken und inneren Bilder zu vertonen. Die Innigkeit, die Federico Durand in diese Musik legt; die Gefühle, die er in sich trägt, können vermutlich nur von denen nachvollzogen werden, die versuchen, durch seine Augen zu sehen und vielleicht eigene Bilder hinzufügen. Wer das Experiment mitmacht, und wirklich bereit ist, darf sich aber über eine wirklich wundervolle Klangreise freuen, die einem die eigene Kindheit in ihrer Unschuld und Schönheit wieder zu einem kleinen Teil zurückbringt.

Text: Kristof Beuthner

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Thank you very much Nillson & Kristoff Beuthner

Dwars Radio (Netherlands)

If you like, please listen Here

Beautiful review by Future Sequence.

I love field recordings. Well used, there's something special about them. They can create beautiful, moving textures that really add to a track. In the large part, Federico has this absolutely nailed, and right from the start, the record is an absolute treat.

El éxtasis de las flores pequeñas has a kind of ramshackle, almost laconic feel to it. Instruments drop in and out beautifully, not particularly worried about whether they complement other instruments around them, but more concerned with the general feel of the sound as a whole. That it does this and yet sounds so ... right, is a real achievement. Even when Federico uses something as potentially tired as rain as a backdrop, the attention to detail and clearly well thought out compositions just work wonderfully.

I love the playing of pretty much everything on this record. The reason it all sounds so great is - I think - because all that playing is about the sense of space, and of stepping around that space rather than simply trying to fill it. It actually sounds to me like those sounds are tumbling in, a sense of the accidental. There's a real sense of understanding that it's as much about what you do play as what you don't. Of course everybody knows that - I'm hardly writing anything new here, but the difference is that's it's one thing to know that, and another to do it. It takes quite a lot of bravery and belief in what you're doing to give your sounds the space they need and let tracks breathe. This record really gets that.

So what you get on the record is storms, tumbling guitar, lovely simple drones, spacious, almost distractedly picked guitar parts that sound something like Gustavo Santaolalla would play, and varying field sounds across the recordings, that almost without exception work really well within the pieces. Even the piano - which can often sound quite clinical and detached on some records - sounds like it's being played on a one hundred year old piano that's just been tuned for the first time in years and is finally sharing it's sounds with you. In short, this record just sounds, real, heartfelt ... authentic.

As favourites tracks go, I gravitate towards Los niños escriben poemas en tiras de papel rojo, La casa de los abuelos and Kim at the moment, but all the tracks are great and it's a consistently high quality recording. I could have done without a couple of (what I think are) bird sounds on El éxtasis de las flores pequeñas, which distract from the feel of that track as a whole, but that's pretty much the only criticism I have, and a really minor one.

Simply put, this record is quite, quite wonderful. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Jonathan Hill for Future Sequence.

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Thank you very much!

F.

P*dis (Japan)

spekkから2010年３月にリリースした1stアルバム「la siesta del ciprés」が絶賛された、大注目のアルゼンチンのサウンド・アーティストfederico durand。その彼の新作がルクセンブルグのOwn Recordsよりリリース。

「el extasis de las flores pequenas（小さな花のエクスタシー）」と題された本作は、Durandが子供の頃に彼が祖父母と一緒に歩いた南アルゼンチンの森への道や、庭で過ごした時間など、彼の子供時代の記憶からインスパイアされて制作されました。

ギターやピアノを基調とした柔らかなタッチの美しいメロディーに、今はもう無い祖父母の家の記憶として、ブエノスアイレスの庭で集めたフィールドレコーディングの様々なサウンドを繊細にブレンド。どこまでもデリケートで心地の良い音のテクスチャーと、郷愁感と優しい気持ちが溢れてくるサウンドが、凝り固まった心をそっと癒してくれそうです。

A beautiful review by Fluid Radio

After the superb La Siesta Del Ciprés released last year on Spekk, Buenos Aires-based Federico Durand returns with El éxtasis de las flores pequeñas, a 35-minutes subdued and beautiful evocation of time spent as a child with his grandparents to the woods in the Argentinean South. Using a reduced and evocative sound palette made of piano and acoustic guitar, augmented with field recordings collected in the gardens of Buenos Aires, Durand conjures memories of his lost grandparents’ home, in a delicate and poetic study of nostalgia and childhood.

As the rain pours outside, the gently reverberating piano notes of opener El pequeño huésped sigue dormido slowly unfurl and are soon accompanied by a quiet acoustic guitar, suggesting a lonely day spent at home, flicking through a worn out photo-album of sepia-tinged pictures. Nothing mournful or sad, just vignettes of long-gone moments, resurfacing and transporting the listener to their own childhood. Subsequent numbers are somehow more oneirical – the melodic motifs being quite distant, suggesting fragments of memories that fold into each other, as in a super-8 film of past holidays. At other times like in Elin for example, the same piano phrase keeps looping, its meaning becoming all the clearer as the piece progresses, as if one could see at last why this particular memory had stuck for so long in our head, giving a sudden new insight into our own story.

Durand has taken great care when recording his instruments, conjuring a necessary distance that perfectly matches his intentions. The piano in La Casa De Los Abuelos is presented through a sonic veil that achingly underlines the nostalgic mood of the piece. In the title track, the guitar is processed through echo and delay-pedals in such a way it suggests faded-out memories, as seen in a shadowbox. Sounds of hands gliding between chord shapes on the guitar’s neck are isolated and amplified, and seems to remove themselves from the interwoven melodies.

Each track tells its story ever so slowly, like a poem being read out loud, progressing at its own unhurried pace. In Atardecer en las montañas, piano and guitar congeal into a droning mass of majestic beauty that drift ecstatically on the surface of a sunlit pond. The delicate touches of xylophone-like instruments add a very interesting contrast to the track that clearly stands out as the most blissful piece on the album. In the closing Kim, Durand’s reverberated guitar comes back in a simple and very evocative chord progression that loops atop processed field recording and gently saturated undulating drones, as a way of letting go of those long-gone memories of childhood, grateful that such moments ever existed.

El éxtasis de las flores pequeñas is a work of extreme sensibility that avoids unnecessary sentimentality or cliched evocations – Federico Durand unveiling its narrative through delicate strokes of unassuming beauty.

- Review by Pascal Savy for Fluid Radio

El éxtasis de las flores pequeñas will be available on 28 March 2011 through Own Records.

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Thank you very much Pascal Savy and Fluid Radio.