"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.