Neural 39 > p.26 >

.sounds

>by Aurelio Cianciotta

Bettina Wenzel: Mumbai Diary:Gruenrekorder> Abstract guttural vocals, field recordings, lean percussive elements played over recordings of city traffic. Glimpses of a background with exotic music and citations that emerge alienated from their original context reassemble during atonal passages into metallic sounds, squeaks, gloomy lullabies and sighs. Bettina Wenzel shares with us an intimate universe, a deliberately fragmented and "gibberish" narration,

intentionally ever-changing and sharpened by the possibility of intrusive meanings that lurk in the delicate interweaving of stylistic connections. Here are iterations that have been largely rebuilt in a home setting - Wenzel's Indian apartment - as part of the search for a sound quality that in the "road catches" was merely hinted at. Finally we arrive at an intense sound, with nasal voices in harmony with the equally loud and evocative sounds of the eastern metropolis.

Autistici: Autistici (Reworked): Resonating Wires: Audiobulb> David Newman, is back as Autistici, this time remixed by a large group of colleagues. From the first sequences Simon Scott gives us a rarefied, cryptic, sensitive and abstract soundscape. Soon the mood turns more airy with the sweetly melodic evolution by Bluermutt and the synthetic resonances of Sawako, a microsound chanteuse with a Venusian charm. Lullabies in "Isan Ice Later", are followed by the delicate juxtapositions of Justin Waris and by the dilated and aesthetic scores of Ian Hawgood and Danny Norbury. The album ends with He Can Jog (Erik Schoster), a digital manipulator who remains delicate and dreamy, poetically ambient and elegiac. Mention must also be made of Richard Chartier and Francisco Lopez, who reiterate their skills at forming avantgarde twists and passages, consumed in reductionist beats, resonant and stylized.

Molly Berg, Olivia Block, Steve Roden & Stephen Vitiello: Moss:12k> This interesting live project has been recorded in the Trinity Cathedral in San Jose, California. The audio performance, part of the comprehensive program of the Biennial 01SJ Festival, is effectively calibrated in its improvisational approach, full of arrangements and sophisticated passages, made even more alluring by the very particular acoustic that bursts clearly from the environment. The sacred space has obviously encouraged the sense of calmness that pervades the acoustic sequences, interspersed with field recordings and electronic inserts, enriched by guitar derivations. Extemporaneous confluences, charming and imaginative, proof of a rarefied musicality, a result of the common search for spontaneity, skillfully manipulated, minimal yet intense, heavy with presages and passion.

Francisco Meirino & Brent Gutzeit: Five Years Of Work For A Strange Result:TrustLost> Flawlessly integrated in this project - the result of 5 years of collaboration - are the broken electro-acoustic frequencies of Meirino and the drones and intense pulses of Gutzeit. They are very familiar with dynamic digital jumps and unconventional sound research. The former is well-known for his releases as Phroq, while the latter is a specialist of elegant noisy caesuras,

still active in TV Pow, a laptop trio. In this release it is not always easy to determine the moments when one or other audio-artist assumes control, but this matters little in the overall economy of the ten tracks, which are juxtaposed in a hyper-vivid continuum, sometimes melancholic and highly imaginative. There are also field recordings between the grooves that have been heavily processed and combine to express a collage of very refined and intriguing sounds.

Hanna Hartman: H^2:Komplott> Hanna Hartman focuses on evolving the characteristics of sounds, revealing correspondences that are not always implicit and imagining new concatenations of forms and frequencies. Aural jolts, jumps and continuous tremors are often mixed with difficult to distinguish field recordings, in addition to whirling envelopes and more metallic sounds. The five tracks proposed in "H^2" are the result of a careful search and a crafty combination of recordings. This is Hartman's third release for Komplott, after "Longitude/Cratere" and "Ailanthus", equally dense and stylized releases, but from which the aesthetic evolution is clear. Here there are also instruments, percussion and the voice of the soprano Ida Falk, while many previous techniques are artfully amplified and move in new directions. The result is a very fascinating and exciting continuum of sound, full of creative ideas and never conventional. Neural 39 > p.27 > .sounds

Nicola Ratti: 220 Tones:DieSchachtel> Analog synthesizers, a Farfisa organ, turntables, a tape recorder, a CRT TV: all devices that have no reason to exist without electricity. The relationship between the instruments and the electric continuum is precisely the research ground upon which are unraveled the seven distinct tracks that make up "220 Tones", the new album by Nicola Ratti. Melodic rhythms and often restrained tensions permeate the scores of the electro-acoustic "soundscapes", giving rise to smoothly calibrated chords, in a stylistically eclectic and gentle formal balance, refined and musical in passages of sinuous harmonic interactions and suggestive inserts. Intense but melancholic atmospheres come alive between the grooves with sensitive starts, always revealing a very personal sound poetic not without improvisational components that direct the flow of energy.

Synusonde: Yug:MinusHabensRecords> "Yug" is a project that stems from a meeting between the electronic composer Paolo Bragaglia, in a creative symbiosis with the talented musician Matteo Ramon Arevalos, who both share a passion for the piano. The purpose of Synusonde is to test the many expressive possibilities of this instrument, reviewing a range of stylistic options or "intrinsic" elements of this medium, ranging from ambient to minimalism,

through to glitch and chamber music. Bragaglia's analog and digital structures support and "hijack" at the same time the virtuoso piano scores of Arevalos, who is always evocative and charismatic in "bending" the many citations to an imaginative use, highly sensorial and reactive. The fluctuating melodies don't always arrive at an end, but this does not detract from their power, acting as a whole in a strongly dreamlike, visionary and experimental way.

Noish: Free SS 15:FreeSoftwareSeries> Inspired by "Noise & Capitalism", a book + audio-cd by Mattin & Anthony Iles - this album features another radical sound activist, Oscar Martin, aka Noish, an experimenter whose work is as "cryptic" as the aforementioned text, but still effective in its presentation of a "transcoding". This work makes use of performative meta-criticism as it reintroduces the same doubts about musical stereotypes and the

Myo: Memory Gospel:MemoryGospel> Envelopes "stretched" beyond all limits, circular sounds fascinatingly unfolded among cracks, feedbacks, loops and rhythmic digital beats. Myo is not new to experimenting with combinations of static noises, hums, microsounds and mildly noisy techniques. The sounds are finely calibrated, however, and shy away from excessively harsh connotations in favor of more celestial atmospheres, altering the harmonic parts

Lugano Fell: Slice Repair:Baskaru> Lugano Fell is a solo project by James Taylor, a founding member of the tech house duo Swayzak. The refined sequences in "Slice Repair" seem to rise in a very prudent way, counterbalanced by a whole set of compositional techniques widely practiced in recent years: heavy use of samples alternating with clusters of sounds and more subdued and sparse passages; frequent glitches complemented by noisy intrusions; and dynamics related to them as "noise" and "subversive frequencies”. "What fascinates me about digital media is that you can transform anything that can be decoded into 0s and 1s, crossing different forms and languages," says Noish. The result is a combination of software such as Shell, Pure Data and ARdour, together with tape and cassette recorders, mixer feedbacks, the summa of a productive "pauperism" which is actually very fruitful and imaginative.

and the tones, while placing artificial constructions in the background that could be confused with analog regurgitations. Remaining raw and vivid, the tracks are strongly coherent, staying clear of overused stylistic strategies, modulated melancholic airs and schizoid interludes. Audio reverberations, an imaginative déjà vu of our less abused sound perceptions, joints where we suddenly recognize a sound, a vibration in the air that for a moment reminds us of something else.

sound collages of various kinds, both acoustic and digital. The minimalist textures still interweave, there's a certain electro-acoustic taste present and a pinch of post-rock emerges among the granular soundscapes and drones, musique concrete and atmospheric patterns. In short, style and technique and we don't know what prevails - useful for chasing emotions that in clubbing practices are shadowed by energy and physicality.