After 5 years spent exploring improvised and noise guitar, Xavier Mussat opened a parenthesis without his usual instrument. He recorded abstract sound ambiances to be used as background sounds to accompany the work of his students during the intuitive drawing classes he gives. Here simplicity prevailed : he used the cheap internal microphone of his computer and several objects (bowls, balls, crumpled paper, table, and finally a hint of prepared banjo), as well as remixed sounds taken from videos of snowy landscapes. Experimenting with the austerity of a minimalist aesthetic, he extracted 4 tracks from these raw textures and materials.

Anastasia Vronski is a versatile experimental musician from Perm, Russia. Since years she has been creating an impressive and quite diverse body of work. Many of her tracks can be classified as “drone “or “noise”, but they always have a specific, often intriguing qualities. Above all, she’s not an artist who will do the same twice, and maybe that’s why some of her pieces are sometimes published separately. Since we thought many of them deserved more exposure, we decided to make a selection of such works in a compilation album : Estrangements, published in two volumes. While first one consisted of 4 minimal conceptual pieces, second one is made of 10 shorter tracks focusing on mysterious ambiances and dense sound textures. One of them, “the pack” wasn’t published before and was made specially for this compilation. The selection of tracks was made by the artist and the label, trying to make the compilation as cohesive as possible. We hope it will make you curious to discover more works from her.

“José Gallardo launches through Pueblo Nuevo his latest album ‘Humores‘ (pn137). Unlike his previous ‘Sinfonía para un hombre solo… en su casa‘ (pn107, 2016), which exhibits the realization of field recordings as a guiding thread, ‘Humores‘ makes reference to the moods or temperaments according to the classification of Hippocrates, considered the father of medicine. It is, thus, a kind of suite that is composed of emotional representations instead of dances.

The humoral theory, in force from Greek Antiquity until after the Renaissance, comprised four temperaments: Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholic and Sanguine. Each one of them was associated with an organ and with a secretion of the body (yellow bile, phlegm, black bile, and blood, respectively) and health would depend on the balance between these elements. The word ‘humor’ comes from the Latin ‘humore’ which means liquid or fluid.

As a means of opening, Gallardo adds a fifth state, that of ‘Ansiedad’ (Anxiety), where music tries to connect itself with the future from the present. This is the only track on which we hear an instrument played in a traditional way or without being deconstructed, the Saz of the Middle East, and from this material is apparently also extracted to create adjacent sounds.

Predominant in this album are rough textures, carefully agitated sounds obtained by microsampling – often treated in a granular way, and cacophonous conglomerations, almost always in counterpoint with their opposites, as in the game of resonances and punctual sounds of ‘Melancolía’ (Melancholy). The last track, ‘Sanguíneo Pasional’ (Sanguine Passional), is divided into two very clear moments, the second of them based on a calm drone that brings peace or, better, balance, to close ‘healthily’ this interesting set of music.”

Bryan Holmes
(Río de Janeiro, Brasil. Noviembre / November 2018)