"A través del espejo" reviewed by Fluid Radio

A Través Del Espejo is another highly accomplished album from composer Federico Durand, his first on 12k. Whilst employing a similar palette of instruments and techniques to previous (excellent) albums like El libro de los árboles mágicos, this collection seems to look less to the forest, hills and skies, instead radiating a warmer domesticity.

Bell-like sounds and scrapes feel close to the ear, close to the hand – you can almost imagine (and at times, hear) Durand reaching for small sounding objects, using microphones as instruments, pushing looping pedals, coaxing gentle collages out of his chosen ingredients.

Grain (whether sound or film), music boxes, glockenspiels, are sometimes associated with a particular strand of uncritical nostalgia, the same one that gives us ‘retro’ filters for smartphone pictures (perhaps an argument for another day) but there is none of that here; instead Durand gives us ten loose but perfectly formed miniatures that frame a sense of home as both domestic and dream-like.

Highlights could be the crystal clear high end chiming loop at the centre of Diorama, or the burbles and clicks of Canción de la Vía Láctea (Milky Way Song). Indeed, the whole second half of the album is particularly strong, seeming to swell outwards and upwards in a way that confirms Durand as a quiet talent, making the best music of his career so far. A Través Del Espejo is a thing of restrained wonder, a love song to home, hearth and the warmth of magnetic tape. I can’t wait to hear what’s next. – Highly recommended.

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Thank you very much Fluid Radio for this wonderful review! F.

Magical Imaginary Child ~ Reviewed by Fluid Radio

Magical Imaginary Child ~ Chihei Hatakeyama & Federico Durand

Chihei Hatakeyama, Japan’s ambient auteur of all things light and airy, has been fairly busy of late, pouring out sunbeamed sub bass radiation and a host of space pads since 2008. His most acclaimed works probably remain those on the esteemed Hibernate label, concillatorily ‘The River’ for quenching a periodic state of the year’s unease. But by and large, Hatakeyama has pulled in new ears on every new record, and here he’s joined by the very able and revolvently contrasting Farewell Poetry styles of Federico Durand.

Durand I’d like to state is not a member of Farewell Poetry, but this ideology – of mistaken identity, of transcendent stylish mane, blossoms the individuality of both collaborators into a delightfully tranquil hotchpotch. There are also shadows of David Tagg’s ‘Waist Deep Seas Of Milk’ about the whole (some) affair, a lush bathe in absorbent honeydew drones.

The first sound you hear on this lp, Magical Imaginary Child is a careful tone float, a quintessence chord, stapled together with that gentle field recordist touch both artists carve from the bark. The last melody contrariwise creates a sense of essential ascendente.

Instead of wonderfully raggedy, ‘Magical Imaginary Child’ is wilfully astral, applying a sensuous approach to tone and texture. A tone ripples like a bicep of the World’s Supplest Organism competition, Hatakeyama and Durand shaping promising verses that fade with the penny being dropped. Whether that child is imaginary we may know, and whether this music is greatly interesting we may know as well. In magic, never is a truer word spoken; the ultimate paradox, and the ultimate reason for musical adventure.

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Thank you very much Mick Buckinham and Fluid Radio for this hearfelt review! F.

"Luz" (Streamline, 2012) reviewed by Fluid Radio

Fluid Radio

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!

A beautiful review by Fluid Radio

FEDERICO DURAND – EL LIBRO DE LOS ÁRBOLES MÁGICOS
Posted On: June 11, 2012

A sense of place. And a sense of time, passing. These are the aims of much of the music we might describe as operating on experimental frequencies. Whether conjured through field recordings, the description of resonating spaces – both real and imaginary, both acoustic and electronic, or the associations of particular instruments, these recordings aim for a world beyond simply ‘the studio’ and ‘the stage’.

With this expanded world at their fingertips, composers look beyond the everyday to the imagined, the idealized and the nostalgic. Thinking beyond such simplified areas as the ‘soundtrack to an imaginary film’, works emerge that are drawn from memory and dreams as much as documentary invocations of place.

El libro de los árboles mágicos is composer Federico Durand’s homage to the village in rural Argentina where his mother lives – drawn from “the voice of that reality and also its echo, which is born out of dream and fantasy.” There are field recordings aplenty here, the chirruping of birds, the crunch of boots on gravel, or maybe snow, the rush of a summer downpour, but from the overlapping chords of Crisantemo onwards, this is no simple snapshot of a place at one moment in time.

Instead, there is a gentle progression from the day to day idyll of the valleys to the heights and solitude of the mountains – suggested by the way the balance of the album shifts from more environmental sounds to more in depth, electronic processes – a move from a photo album to a dream perhaps?

As such, the album presents itself as a journey – and yes, a gentle sense of time passing – summer to late autumn. The extended washes of sound, hints of delayed piano, and expertly placed environment sounds combine to a serene, almost stately whole. Highlights? The way the undulating electronics and backwards attacks of La edad dels bosque overlap with the high-summer sounds of crickets. The almost fanfare like quality of the final track, with its touches of looped zither or harp like tones.– Recommended!

John Boursnell for Fluid Radio.

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Thank you very much John Bournell and Fluid Radio! 

F.

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.