AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS TRANSLATION: SCOTT M. CULP
EDITION: (CD Liner Notes) Tone of a Pitch Records DATE: November 2008
When we first attended the concert which is here represented on this recording, we could have barely imagined
what it would be like to listen to this music again after a year had passed. Now we can easily understand how
information from what happens around us is processed and how all these facts are transmitted and passed
around to other people. If we acknowledge that in some circumstances there will exist some clear and irreparable
losses with respect to the original performance, we know that on the other hand we will be treated to surprising
gains in the reactivation of memory that this sound-document will spark. This music indeed maintains the
fundamental links to the original performance, one which has been transformed into repeatable event, a moment
in time that is renewed in a recording that we can listen to over and over again.
In this piece of work, which is more real than the reality that created it, the silence takes on an unusual depth: its
cleansing is broadened and emerges as more amplified in those spaces that separate the performers; the interplay
of the musicians seems edgier and the innerness of their approaches more intense. What is seen is an
experimental formality that involves all the musical movements and incentivizes freer glances over music that is
developed throughout six compositions that reflect off each other as if this were a game with mirrors. These
improvisations are small juxtapositions, processes of sound assemblages - with the term assemblage coined in
1953 by Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) with respect to the arts, referring to those works which, he notes “go beyond
collages”. The principle that underlies the realization of assemblages is the “aesthetics of accumulation” in which
juxtaposed miniatures are expressed following a dynamic of randomness under which the musicians experience
the freedom to exchange and share ideas and which address any types of aim regarding sound. The project which
has come together takes off from this mechanism of gathering, and is one of a meeting of four instruments which
are manifest in a totality-dialogue, traveling the path of the simplest forms of construction, supported in a
balanced set of acoustic sound moments that interact uncompromisingly throughout the performance.
