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EVERY HIDDEN COLOR:
LUZ
Posted On: October 7, 2012
Posted In: Every Hidden
Color, Every Hidden
Color - Luz, Federico Durand,
John Boursnell,
Nicholas
Szczepanik
Environmental sounds receding before gentle notes. Notes
blurring into tones. Tones washing into grains, and fading into clouds and
spaces. Spaces filled by the sound of rain…
These two long-form pieces are the result of
collaboration between Federico Durand and Nicholas Szczepanik – both authors of
fantastic albums this year – Durand’s ‘El Libro De Los Árboles Mágicos’ and
Szczepanik’s ‘Please Stop Loving Me’ – the first an expert blend of field
recordings and electronic textures, the latter a wonderfully realized slice of
choral drone.
There is always a danger that collaboration will result
in less than the whole – either each player backs off too much, too respectful
and we lose their individual voices, or both deploys every bag-of-tricks they
know to try and snare the spotlight. Happily, there is none of this here. We
can guess at who might be responsible for leading each segment; the evolving
drone in the second half of the first side bears Szczepanik’s fingerprints –
the interplay of recordings and textures that bookend it feel more like
Durand’s, but to ‘train-spot’ these passages misses the point of most collaborative
practices, and the quality of the music here.
Having open, slow moving pieces works to the music’s
advantage – rather than try to distill ideas into four or six pieces, segments,
ideas, themes, sounds, are given space to unspool slowly (like the sound of
film spooling through projector that runs through the opening minutes of side
2). While this can lead to hours of aimless noodling – a cd-r is can feel a
very long seventy-four minutes – here the shifts between longer passages are
perfectly timed; a looped vocal phoneme pings gently between speakers, and
twenty seconds later, the entrance of plucked chords – a hint of banjo –
changes the focus beautifully.
The second side slides in and out of focus – like the
sepia pink-toned photograph on the cover – sometimes highlighting notes and
chords, sometimes slipping back into time-dilating waves of granular sound.
These shifts between textures are a joy to listen to – never jarring, never
simply one obliterating the other – a sense of four hands at the desk, working
with one mind.
This is a gem of an album; beautiful, thoughtful, that
creates its own sense of time by giving its many ideas space to unfold.
Guaranteed to reward repeated listens, get this while you can. Recommended!
- John Boursnell for Fluid Radio
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Thank you very much Fluid Radio, John Boursnell and Daniel Crossley!