presque rien

CD – Rhizome.s  03 , France 2013

L'eau (qu'ill contient) ne change presque rien au verre, et le verre (où elle est) ne change rien à l'eau.
The water (what it contains) does almost nothing to the glass, and the glass (where it is) does not alter the water.

Francis Ponge, Le verre d'eau, 1948

1. Presque Rien - 79'39''

Ana Foutel, Barry Chabala, Brian Labycz, Bruno Duplant, Bryan Eubanks, D'Incise, Dafne Vicente Sandoval, Daniel Jones, Darius Ciuta, Delphine Dora, Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, Dominic Lash, Ernesto Rodrigues, Eva-Maria Houben, Fergus Kelly, Ferran Fages, Gil Sansón, Grisha Shakhnes, Iliya Belorukov, Jamie Drouin, Jez Riley French, Johnny Chang, Jonas Kocher (with Dafne Stefanou), Joseph Clayton Mills, Julien Héraud, Jürg Frey, Keith Rowe, Lance Austin Olsen, Lee Noyes, Lucio Capece, Massimo Magee, Michael Pisaro, Paco Rossique, Paulo Chagas, Pedro Chambel, Philippe Lenglet, Rachael Wadham, Ryoko Akama (with John Bryan), Simon Reynall, Stefan Thut, Travis Johnson and Vanessa Rossetto

Cover design Ryoko Akama

Reviews

Right from the start their are a couple of problematic issues with this work and more surface as one listens. First, of course, is the title of the release, Duplant knows very well that it was used for a series of pieces by Luc Ferrari and an album on INA-GRM. Duplant's source, however, is a line from Francis Ponge: "L'eau (qu'il contient) ne change presque rien au verre, et le verre (où elle est) ne change rien à l'eau.", translated thusly by Michael Pisaro for this recording: "The water (what it contains) does almost nothing to the glass, and the glass (where it is) does not alter the water." He simply liked the phrase in that context (a context which was to be the instructional score for the work) and went with it. It's an interesting notion, to intentionally disregard any proprietorship of a phrase or title; I kind of admire the effrontery, as if someone titled a new recording, "Bitches Brew" or a new novel, "Gravity's Rainbow"--problematic in the extreme but at least a little provocative.

Secondly, Duplant takes the quotation and asks a large number of musicians to actualize it (limiting themselves to two minutes), concentrating on the phrase, "presque rien", an action not really a whit different from the approach taken fairly routinely by Manfred Werder, right down to using Ponge as a source. What is one to make of this? It's something I've had tangential thoughts on for quite a while--a musician establishes a certain attack, carves a niche and it somehow becomes his or her own, territory where it's not considered polite to trespass, at least overtly so. But if (I would think to myself) an approach is particularly beautiful or rewarding, why not? One can acknowledge that a door has been opened by someone else by why not use it as well? Except that such a high premium is placed on originality that this becomes taboo, the more so the closer one inches toward it. Can you perform your own variation on 4'33"? Maybe there's a distinction to be drawn between (in music) doing it and releasing a recording of it. But why? Duplant seems to be edging toward a Mattin-like questioning of norms held sacred in this field and, even if the results are uneven, I can't help but think this is by and large a good thing.

Ah, the results. Forty-four musicians are represented herein, sequenced alphabetically by first name. I suppose I should list them, especially since a "list" is more or less what Duplant was after. Ana Foutel, Barry Chabala, Brian Labycz, Bruno Duplant, Bryan Eubanks, D'Incise, Dafne Vicente Sandoval, Daniel Jones, Darius Ciuta, Delphine Dora, Dimitra Lazaridou Chatzigoga, Dominic Lash, Ernesto Rodrigues, Eva-Maria Houben, Fergus Kelly, Ferran Fages, Gil Sansón, Grisha Shakhnes, Iliya Belorukov, Jamie Drouin, Jez Riley French, Johnny Chang, Jonas Kocher (with Dafne Stefanou), Joseph Clayton Mills, Julien Héraud, Jürg Frey, Keith Rowe, Lance Austin Olsen, Lee Noyes, Lucio Capece, Massimo Magee, Michael Pisaro, Paco Rossique, Paulo Chagas, Pedro Chambel, Philippe Lenglet, Rachael Wadham, Ryoko Akama (with John Bryan), Simon Reynall, Stefan Thut, Travis Johnson and Vanessa Rossetto. It's very difficult listening in the sense of trying to assign any kind of structure or cohesiveness to the undertaking. The actualizations appear one immediately following the other, generally pretty quiet (not surprising, given the nature of the image in the line referred to) but, in memory, tending to blur into one another. It becomes a fools errand to say, "liked that one, don't like this so much", etc. but there's also no sense of each contribution fitting into soe greater whole. It's simply a list. I found it frustrating in a manner similar to my experiences with much of Tom Johnson's music, particularly something like "The Chord Catalog". As there, it becomes clear that one has to listen differently, though it's no easy task for these ears to manage that. I would have preferred that the pieces were isolated from one another, with perhaps a minute or more of silence between. But then, you'd be confronted with more art object than list and the latter is Duplant's objective, so you're forced to just deal with it or not. 

The problem is that doing so and given the brevity of the pieces, you almost have to sit and follow the contributor listing with some intentness as you go. "OK, here's Eubanks, this one's Frey, now Thut", etc., mentally checking them off as you go. It's not how I enjoy listening, though, preferring to hear the thing "as a whole", except there is no whole, hence the frustration. I find myself, after each track, getting up and pausing the player, an awkward maneuver to say the least, though I can picture Mattin grinning at such activity. Loaded into iTunes and experienced at random via shuffle, I've no doubt they'll be welcome nuggets, even if that means abjuring their listlike qualities. Tant pis! :-) Brian Olewnick (Just Outside)

What is your favorite album ever? What a simple, but vast and complex subject/question!
So much music, so many sounds (through my window, my every day life, my dreams), composers, musicians could provide the answer to this question. So much… In fact, almost anything, almost nothing too.
Almost nothing, Presque rien as in the three pieces from Luc Ferrari. These Presque rien, just as John Cage’s 4’33 (another contender for the title of ‘favorite album ever’) have, in quite radical ways, though different, revolutionised the music of the twentieth century and beyond; questioning practices, habits, convictions, without ever trying to shock.
Presque rien, almost nothing, what a statement of humility! And what poetry in the titles! Presque rien n°1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer, Almost nothing 1, sunrise at the sea, Presque rien n°2, ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple, Almost nothing # 2, and continues the night in my head multiple and Presque rien avec filles, Almost nothing with girls.
But what about the music itself, this ‘music without music’? What is there in Presque rien n°1? Almost nothing. Some animals, the sea, a harbour with its fishing boats, its inhabitants, the cicadas, lots of cicadas. No composition, it seems, but this is perhaps not true. Is this music? Is this non-music? No, it is neither one nor the other, it is far beyond. It is the creation / recreation of a real life, ideal and utopic, as we may also find in Jean Giono’s Provence.
This way of recording, this questioning of reality, we find it in some major contemporary composers as Manfred Werder, Michael Pisaro, Jez Riley French, in their own way.
Presque rien n°2, or how to try to penetrate substantially a nocturnal landscape. Ferrari walks (virtually?), recording on magnetic tape the elements and sounds that surround him (like birds, cars), commenting (whispering) in real time (but it’s not true) what he does and sees. This meta-language, this mise en abîme, should seem/be truly hermetic, boring, but yet, just the opposite occurs. Here, all is sensuality, subtlety (as always with Ferrari), poetry, intelligence.
This poetry, this sensuality, transpires in the piece Presque rien avec filles, where the forest becomes a place of fantasy through the various and discrete feminine multilingual confessions.
In all these parts, the spirit of Francis Ponge is not far. This meticulous (because, with non-composed pieces, lies a true sense of organisation of chance) and poetic reconstruction/reformulation of reality.
There is not a day, a moment, when/where these Presque rien do not resonate in me, either as a simple listener, a musician, or a composer. Like John Cage’s 4’33 has literally revolutionised the concept, representation and perception of silence, Presque rien by Luc Ferrari has opened and still opens our hearts, minds and imaginations to the world we are surrounded by. Richard Pinnel (The Watchful Ear)

Cru

CD – Creative Sources Recordings – CS272, Lisbon 2014

1. Cru - 37'06''

Ernesto Rodrigues - Viola

Ferran Fages - Electronics

Recorded in 2013 & 2014, Barcelona & Lisbon

Cover design Carlos Santos

https://ernestorodrigues.bandcamp.com/album/cru

Reviews

Though Fages is credited with "electronics" on the sleeve, most of the non-viola sounds on this recording (those provided by Rodrigues) seem to be of the field recording variety, often of vehicles on a highway, though all enveloped in a dusty semi-hum. Through this, it's possible to perceive thin electronic strands, I think, but I'm never quite sure if they're there or even if they might not also stem from some particularly high viola strokes. Rodrigues is sometimes oddly playful here, plucking at the strings as if suggesting a gambol down the road, an itinerant musician strolling the highway's shoulder, wryly commenting on the passing traffic. There's not much more to it than that, a single 37-minute track that ambles leisurely, but the sound is full and interesting, drawing one in well enough if, at the end of the day, leaving one with only a hazy impression of what has just occurred. Sometimes that's all that's needed and it was often the case with me, but the music is amorphous enough that many more casual listeners may find little to grasp hold of. Brian Olewnick (Just Outside)

Now this is a curious one, likely to be overlooked and possibly misunderstood if not paid proper attention to.Cru is another release involving Ernesto Rodrigues on his incredibly prolific Creative Sources label, one of five to include the violist in the most recent batch alone. I have yet to listen to them all but the inclusion of Ferran Fages’ electronics on this duo disc helped Cru to the top of the listening pile, and I am very pleased it did so.

At first this release sounds like a particularly lovely recording of the two musicians performing outdoors, in an urban setting, playing quietly and sparsely, allowing their sounds to blend into the independently occurring environment around them. For the first couple of listens I assumed that that was what I was hearing, and spent time trying to picture the precise surroundings the musicians set themselves amongst as vehicles of various sizes (and I think more than one train) seem to pass by at differing distances. Although the environmental sounds really take the foreground here I was troubled by the way that it was difficult to fix a definite image in my head that encompassed everything  to be heard. Exploring the minimal sleeve notes before a third listen then revealed that although we are only presented with the one track here, it was recorded both in Fages’ home city of Barcelona in 2013, and Rodrigues’ home of Lisbon the following year.  Clearly then what we hear is some kind of splicing together of two recordings.

In late November I saw Ferran briefly and he confirmed to me that (for this release at least) he had not met up with Rodrigues. So rather than being two duo recordings in two cities spliced together, clearly Cru is made up of two solo recordings overlaid on one another. What I didn’t have time to ask Ferran are any more details beyond this, but that’s where the fun lies anyway, relying on your ears to figure things out. How did this recording come about? Did one of the two musicians record themselves outside, and the second then played into and over the result? Were both musicians outside? We know that one recording was made months before the other, but did the second musician respond directly to the first recording, or did they merely make a similar recording of the same length so the two could be juxtaposed?

Its hard to pin down answers to these questions. Certainly, listening closely, it does feel like one of the musicians is responding to the other. There are long silences, or rather, environmental interludes when the musicians make no sound, only for both musicians to start playing together in roughly the same time brackets. This suggests that one of the pair played along with the first recording. If this did happen then I will guess that Rodrigues took the secondary role as the way the electronics seem to take the lead more often than not. Were they both outside? Were any of the musicians outside? Perhaps both musicians played into a separate field recording. The options are endless and no amount of close listening really reveals anything that gives the game completely away.

What we do know is that the end result is a quite beautiful, if vaguely distant and hard to connect to recording. The sounds both musicians make are subtle, often very quiet, often hiding amongst the grey hum of traffic, the blur of the city. Ages’ electronics are of the elemental, feedback end of things, gentle whistles, tightly controlled screeches. Rodrigues’ viola sounds aren’t a million miles away, again suggesting he played along to Fages’ lead, focussing on brief high pitched tones and textural scrapes. Its all very tentative however, and fragile in form, as the instrumental sounds often slip away from earshot into the background detritus, or pitch themselves so close that it shard to tell them apart in the first place. Cru is a very delicate, beautiful and yet resolutely mysterious work. The long silences give the music a feeling of fracture, of decentred imbalance, as the recording environment seems to take precedence over the musicians’ contributions, a feeling of distance and thinking too hard about how it is all put together only makes it all feel stranger still. Its a fascinating and rewarding listen though, and one I recommend you don’t let slip past unnoticed. Richard Pinnell (The Watchful Ear)

[…] E ei-las a florescerem na parceria entre Ferran Fages e Ernesto Rodrigues, “Cru”. Com insistente uso de “field recordings” (“vemos” um dia de chuva, com comboios e automóveis a passar abrindo um rasgo de água), entramos em pleno domínio da “sound art”. Os processos são improvisacionais, mas neste CD os habituais padrões da música improvisada desaparecem. Somos absorvidos pela esfera do som, aquela imaginada por Giacinto Scelsi. Percebemos que há música já antes da música propriamente dita. Rui Eduardo Paes (Jazz.pt)

A composite of environmental sounds, electronics, and viola, recorded in Barcelona, Spain and Lisbon, Portugal from intrepid audio explorers Ferran Fages and Ernesto Rodrigues, the single long work taking the listener on a theoretical journey of transparent traffic, squealing wheels and indeterminate location, engrossing in its detail and the mystery it presents. Squidco

It seems to me that the current ethos in improvisation - mind you, in a certain part of improvised music that is seemingly dominated by the Erstwhile roster - is blurring consciously the line between music that is improvised or composed (as you know by now, some composers still practice open, indeterminate forms of composition) and environmental sounds that are accidental or the conscious result of the musician(s)' desire to record them - to the point that the (untrained?) ear, left on its own, may perceive music in what may actually be a "random" noise and consider part of the field recording sounds that may actually come from the musician(s).
Cage would be proud - and some of the followers of the EAI scene (or what is still being called as such) may notice with some disappointment that certain improvisers have started rejecting actual interplay, by overlaying, pasting together - in the space of an album, of course - what are in fact solo improvisations. Luciano Maggiore & Enrico Malatesta's talabalacco is one such example, but the approach seems to shine more on cru.
Richard Pinnell suggests that Ernesto Rodrigues, being the second to record himself, has listened to Ferran Fages and places his sounds in response to the first improvisation. Therefore, no accidental fooling around. In spite of what the title might suggest, cru is - unless if you are new to this kind of music - definitely not "crude", far from raw. Some of what you and I can hear here may also be heard in just about any urban environment, but, listening to this here and now, you can notice the beauty in what otherwise comes and goes for various purposes. This kind of spirit that this kind of music has brought - thanks to Cage, mind you - may be synthesized in this little epiphanic story (just a few days after I had first listened - or tried to listen - to the uncompromising Weather Sky by Rowe and Nakamura):
Part of my nearly daily routine is going to the supermarket in the area closest to my home (my city is renowned for its number of supermarkets and hypermarkets per capita...) and grabbing some pastry product from there, as they are cheaper than in the actual pastries from the very same area. I often eat right away, at the exit, but sometimes I cross hastily the one-way street and sit on one of the free benches in front of a long block of flats (Ceausescu-era, of course). From the block next to me I could hear the frequency of a vacuum cleaner. (I knew it was a vacuum cleaner several minutes after, when it was turned off.)
Music to my ears as it captured perfectly the spirit of the landscape: above the supermarket across the street, also seconded by rows of blocks of flats, the sky did not betray the sun, just the effects of the sunset - slowly moving yellow-dusty-golden clouds between which vapor trails (there's an airport not very far from the city) were also moving, slightly faster. For a while, before the disappearance of that vacuum cleaner sound, no traffic on this street, just the oceanic sound of very distant traffic. Everything was in its place. yigruzeltil (sputnik music)

Primary Envelopment

CD – Creative Sources Recordings - CS286, Lisbon 2014

Architecture is a common source of metaphor in the eternal and often thankless struggle to describe, capture, label or otherwise burden musical concepts with what almost invariably prove to be the most intractable substantiations of verbal taxonomy. It even creeps into some of the more fanciful forms of compositional technique, such as the idea of crafting a melody as the sonic (or at least, notational) reflection of an urban skyline—Villa-Lobos’ Symphony No. 2 comes to mind as a relatively recent example. Of course, architecture and composition do have much in common. At their best, both are forms of creative expression—at the very least, they are expressions of creativity, an idea not at all incompatible with Stravinsky’s Norton reflections—and, more appositely here, both are forms of planning. 

Improvisation, however, is more like building. There is a hands-on aspect to it that involves sound matter, instrumentation, dialog and, especially, time, in ways that differ significantly from how they are interrelated in other musical processes, notably pencil-and-paper composition. So there is something truly refreshing in Robert Smithson’s comparison of building to architecture in his brilliant text, A Sedimentation of the Mind. 

Building takes on a singular wildness as loaders scoop and drag soil all over the place. Excavations form shapeless mounds of debris, miniature landslides of dust, mud, sand and gravel. […] These processes of heavy construction have a devastating kind of primordial grandeur, and are in many ways more astonishing than the finished project—be it a road or a building. The actual disruption of the earth’s crust is at times very compelling, and seems to confirm Heraclitus’s Fragment 124, “The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.” 

Perhaps I should remind the reader, here, to pay especial attention to Heraclitus’s use of the word “like” in the final sentence, lest someone think I am suggesting that improvised music is quite simply a heap of sonic rubble. Instead, I would invite the reader to visualize the activity, the sense of rhythm and energy, the cycles that manifest at different physical and temporal scales on a building site. 

Another observation by Smithson also seems appropriate here: his response to McLuhan and others’ tendency to define tools in terms of their relation to the species best known for using them—the now long-established idea of the human body merging with tools to create a cyborg—rather than in terms of their actual constitution. 

The manifestations of technology are at times less “extensions” of man (Marshall McLuhan’s anthropomorphism) than they are aggregates of elements. Even the most advanced tools and machines are made of the raw matter of the earth. Today’s highly refined technological tools are not much different in this respect from those of the caveman.

Indeed, a Neolithic flint scraper is no more and no less organic than the silicon holding my laptop together. In fact, the word silicon actually comes from the Latin silex, a name still applied to flint in French and some other Romance languages.

The four builders constructed the music on this CD with just such tools, excavating, shifting and listening as they generate innumerable cycles that cross and interact, establishing relations not all of which can be grasped in one or even ten listenings. The viola, saxophone, laptop computer and electro-acoustic guitar (Javier Pedreira quite rightly prefers to call it a “guitar”, with no need for adjectives or qualifiers) are all “highly refined” and each is an aggregate of earthly elements. With these tools, they build. 

Here, of course, we have a CD, something Smithson would probably consider a sort of “non-site”, yet it is neither a road nor a building. Instead, it is the audible record of its own processes of construction—a primary envelopment.

Wade Matthews

1. Primary Envelopment I – 09’10’’

2. Primary Envelopment II – 03’52’’

3. Primary Envelopment III – 07’32’’

4. Primary Envelopment IV – 10’44’’

5. Primary Envelopment V – 06’52’’

Ernesto Rodrigues – Viola

Wade Matthews – Digital Synthesis, Field Recordings, Amplified Objets

Javier Pedreira - Guitar

Nuno Torres - Alto Saxophone

Recorded in April 2014, Madrid

Cover design Carlos Santos

https://ernestorodrigues.bandcamp.com/album/primary-envelopment

Reviews

Matthews on digital synthesis, field recordings and amplified objects, Pedreira on guitar, Rodrigues on viola and Torres on alto saxophone.

A bit dissimilar to much of the above in terms of an increased textural richness, due I think to Matthews electronics, which form a nice, constantly shifting blanket of sound throughout, into which the others weave their threads, Torres a little more vociferous here (but not unduly). This is the type of session that falls, for me, into a category frequently found on Creative Sources: an improv date that's very competent, no particular problems, but not standing out in any real way, with no (perceivable by me) really interesting ideas in play. It's fine but, by this point, I understand that this can be achieved and am seeking more. Not to harp unfairly on this particular release, just a general comment. Brian Olewnick (Just Outside)

The manipulation of very high pitches is a distinctive feature of Primary Envelopment, and as with past such albums, including Wade Matthews's Growing carrots in a concrete floor, some of my family does not appreciate this aspect: They say the tones are painful, etc. I don't agree, and not only don't I find the tones to be painful, but the level of control exerted over such high pitches seems therapeutic to me: As opposed to so many high pitches & resonances in my life, which happen as unintentional results (or worse, intentionally noxious results) of other activity, including the electronic speaker distortion I hear so very often at ordinary establishments (and abhor), these pitch regions are used consciously here, serving to ameliorate the numbing effect of the noisy & sonically inconsiderate world. I very much appreciate the insistence — and I'll call it an insistence — that high pitches can be musical, and not only noise. Indeed, Primary Envelopment takes such technique farther than previous albums featuring high-pitched resonance, such as (the recently discussed) Anomonous & Growing carrots itself, in that the pitch variation seems even more carefully controlled. (E.g. White Sickness also features carefully controlled high pitches, although they are less prominent. At another end of something of a spectrum is Joe Morris's exploration of Hendrix's "sound" in Mess Hall, as I discussed here in January.) The high pitches then serve not as extensions of other musical activity, but as a foreground of their own: I'm reminded somewhat of Scelsi's manipulation of overtones, for instance (and the first part of track #3 evokes Aitsi for me, although perhaps not for the performers). It is this aspect that reconfigures the "background" features of the music, differentiating it from some of Rodrigues's other, more restrained albums: High pitches directly manipulate how we hear space via overtone & resonance, so that the space itself is changing, even with a consistent background (which we might otherwise associate more with space). Primary Envelopment is also different from the typical Creative Sources release in that, like the previous recorded collaboration between Rodrigues & Matthews, Erosions (2010), it includes liner notes by Matthews: He talks rather expansively about how improvisation is more akin to the act of building than it is to architecture, that it involves physically diving in & starting to build with an energy that differs from planning. (He also talks a bit about how their complicated musical tools are only aggregates of elements, not so very different from stone age tools, a point I've noted in this space too.) Regarding the other performers, although I apparently decided not to discuss it in this space, I recognize Torres from Pinkdraft, an earlier "landscape" album on Creative Sources that also features Travassos, the designer for Clean Feed, as a musician. (Pinkdraft is not so unlike Pão, on Shhpuma, which I did discuss in January 2013.) Pedreira appeared in this space when I discussed Garnet Skein by Thanos Chrysakis on his Aural Terrains label, also with Wade Matthews, with whom Pedreira appears to work frequently. If Primary Envelopment arises from these four musicians taking a leap & starting to build something, as Matthews suggests, the resulting audible documentation can only be considered a success. But a success at what? I've already noted the exploration of high pitches, but this occurs within a context of broad musical activity: All pitch regions are used, including low drones with static — the album begins with a low rumble quickly joined by very high pitches, and met with a variety of attacks from the wind & strings. The result is a rich tapestry of sound that reconfigures both the foreground-background duality and the sense of movement across space. Although I've focused on attributes, the music becomes more about relation & connectedness than separate elements, even though motion is rarely sustained for more than a few minutes at a time. I find it engrossing, and even with its novelty, it does yield something of a primal sound, as was apparently the intent. (Is the "primary" of the title anything like what Gian Luigi Diana does with electronics on the "primary" track of Tesla Coils? Perhaps.) The sounds that make up the musical "stuff" of Primary Envelopment are indeed all around us (e.g. the rattling of pots on top of my refrigerator when it runs, or more "natural" sounds of wind & rain), even if they need the attention of musicians such as these to seem musical. Although the symphonic tapestry of quasi-everyday sounds evokes e.g. Jeff Shurdut in The Music of Everything, the result is very personal in its detail and transformative in the many ways sounds are related: Relation itself comes to the foreground. Todd McComb (medieval.org)


[…] Em “Primary Development” esse papel está nas sínteses do computador. É um notável álbum de Wade Matthews, a quem se associam Ernesto Rodrigues, Javier Pedreira e Nuno Torres. A estratégia, neste caso, é de contraste e ambivalência: som por camadas (pinceladas) e silêncio, em sucessões de enchimento e esvaziamento. Continua o rótulo “reducionismo” a fazer sentido? Talvez, mas aplica-se a realizações como esta, com igual propriedade, o termo “acrescentacionismo”. Se o “chão” da música, desde Cage, é o silêncio, ou a impossibilidade deste, tudo o que se realize sobre a sua matriz é adição. Não por contrariedade, mas por inerência: se silêncio é som, qualquer som, qualquer organização de sons, vulgo música, traz consigo essa origem silenciosa. Rui Eduardo Paes (Jazz.pt)

En sous-sol il y a avait l’atelier de mon grand-père. En semi sous-sol, pour être exact. De petites ouvertures donnaient sur l’extérieur où je guettais souvent les chevilles d’une inconnue qui n’était pas toi. Dans cette odeur d’acier et de graisse que m’ont ramenée les quatre outils (un par musicien, j'imagine : Wade Matthews, Javier Pedreira, Ernesto Rodrigues et Nuno Torres) dessinés sur la couverture de Primary Envelopment. 

J’essaye de me figurer à quoi peut ressembler l’atelier aujourd’hui. Je ferme les yeux. Je laisse une guitare électrique, un saxophone alto, un violon et des objets amplifiés le faire sonner. Les établis tournent à plein régime. Les hommes y percent, y liment, y vissent, y frisent… Tout est bon pour modifier leurs instruments et le son de leurs instruments bien entendu. Ils font aussi parfois des pauses pour faire le point sur l'avancée de leur travail. A voix basse. 

Par les petites fenêtres, le vent s’engouffre, soulève un peu de poussière de bois, de métal et de cordes, qui s’envole en tourbillon. C’est la fin de l’improvisation enregistrée il y a un an maintenant à Madrid. C’est-à-dire à quelques kilomètres de l’atelier de l’ancêtre. Je ne sais pas à quoi il peut ressembler aujourd’hui. Mais je sais maintenant qu’il sonne encore. Héctor Cabrero (Le Son du Grisli)

Similarly to the introduction of "Erosions", another collaborative release for Creative Sources we talked about some years ago, which involved Ernesto Rodriguies and Neil Davidson, Wade Matthews wisely introduces "Primary Envelopment", a recording where field recordings, amplified objects and digital synthesis by Matther himself converged with Nuno Torres' alto saxophone, Ernesto Rodrigues' viola and Javier Pedreira's guitar, by means of an interesting concptualization where improvisation got compared to building or I'd rather say to construction works, instead of architecture by quoting Robert Smithson's "A Sedimentation of the Mind". According to Smithson's words: "Building takes on a singular wildness as loaders scoop and drag soil all over the place. Excavationas form shapeless mounds of debris, miniature landslides of dust, mud, sand amd gravel". If listeners bear in mind this matching between construction and improvisation, this seemingly abstract session, where the differences between (musical) instruments and working tools got somehow blurred, could mirror that "devasting kind of primordial grandeur" that Smithson matched to building, even if you - you don't have to apologize for that! - won't easily understand who is playing what in many moments of the recording that this fourtet made in april and june 2014 at Smiling Cow Studio in Madrid. A primary envelopment, indeed! Vito Camarretta (Chain DLK)