(Free Improvisation, Electroacoustic, Rossbin) [CD] Ferran Fages, Ruth Barberan, Alfredo Costa Monteiro - Atolon - 2004, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Porto (Portugal), 1964. He lives and works in Barcelona since 1992. He plays accordion and electric guitar. In 1992, he finishes his studies at the Fine Art School of Paris, where he gets his degree in sculpture/multimedia. Apart of his work as a visual artist, he starts to become involved in improvised music from 1995. Since then, his work stands somewhere between visual arts, visual poetry and sound. Since 1998, he is member of 22a, an independent collective for contemporary art.
Ruth Barberan
Barcelona, 1966.
Since her integration in IBA, col.lectiu de musica i dansa improvisades, in1999, she starts to focus her work in free improvisation.Currently, she has two stable formations :
error focus, with Ferran Fages and i treni inerti, with Alfredo Costa Monteiro.
Ferran Fages
Barcelona, 1974 He plays the guitar, turntables and electronics. He's member of the collective IBA since 1999.
He plays regulary in different improvisation projects like:rror focus ( with Ruth Barberan) since 1998, cremaster ( with Alfredo Costa Monteiro) since 2000.
Ambilis (with Dorothee Schmitz) since 2001. He plays with the coreographers and dancers: Olga Mesa, Carme Torrent and Constanza Brncic.
He's played with Joan Saura, Agusti Fernandez, Jakob Draminsky, Franck Stofer, Anton Ignorant, Stefan Prins,Derek Bailey, Margarida Garcia, Francisco Lopez, Andrea Neumann,Peter Kowald, Taku Unami, Masahiko Okura, Masafumi Ezaki, Bukhard Beins, Guiseppe Ielasi, Mark Wastell.... among other - Rossbin
There’s something afoot on the Iberian Peninsula and it sounds damn good. Over the last couple of years, almost everything I’ve heard from that vicinity (beginning, if I recall correctly, with Manuel Mota’s ‘Leopardo’) has had at least something to recommend it, often much more. ‘Atolon’ might be the strongest album from that territory I’ve yet heard. My perhaps unfortunate penchant to think of analogies to visual art when listening to music finds me drawn, in this case, toward the work of Antoni Tapies. This might be close to the way a Tapies piece sounds.
Fages (on “acoustic turntable”—don’t ask me), Barberan (trumpet) and Monteiro (accordion) construct a single improv (divided into four tracks) of immense earthiness, of to-the-bone rawness. You can feel the grit, the rough sand, the sere pavement. It goes without saying that each musician uses non-traditional techniques, but on “Atolon” they’ve chosen to reside almost entirely in the harsher regions of their instruments, those likely to yield rougher textures and more strident tones. While Barberan’s contributions can usually be isolated (breath tones, valve manipulations, scrapings along the trumpet’s body a la Greg Kelley), it often takes sharper ears than mine to distinguish between the other two, Monteiro’s squeezebox never emitting remotely accordion-like sounds. By default, I assume Fages is responsible for much of the blistering ferociousness. But all of that is beside the point. The piece follows a fairly standard arc, gathering steam over the first two sections, peaking (in terms of both volume and emotional intensity) during track three and then subsiding (with several small resurgences), but what a ride it is! While “weiur” (track one) is often rather whispery, it’s full of anxiety and restlessness, rattles, sputters and gratings scurrying rapidly through the space, summoning up an alien, insectile world. By the time you’ve reached the third section, “98y2r”, the assault is almost overwhelming: shuddering bass rubbings slamming against brass-tube roars mixed among god knows what else resulting in an unholy, frightening but, ultimately liberating cacophony. It putt-putts out of existence like three exhausted motors after a grueling climb. Searching for comparisons, I’m thinking of the more raucous sections of Kelley and Lescalleet’s “Forlorn Green”, but “Atolon” truly has a unique, brutal and hyper-imaginative attack that sets it apart from much of the other music I’ve heard this year. Highly recommended. ~ Brian Olewnick, bagatellen.com