Golden Towers and Electric Frictions |CS 386

The biggest group of players is on the last CD, which has Garcia on electronics, Branche on saxophone and Abdul Moimeme on electric guitar, Ernesto Rodrigues on viola and Guilherme Rodrigues on cello. They recorded the five pieces on March 27, 2016 in Scratch Built Studio in Lisbon. While it lists Garcia's name first and it is among these three new releases, that doesn't mean that Garcia is the main operator or conductor here; I'd rather think of him as one of the five people playing this improvised music. While the previous Garcia/Branche CD seemed also improvised to me, this five-person work is of the two the more improvised one. The quintet of players also like their sounds to be sustaining, placing bows on strings, but also motorized objects, buzzing electronics and such like, in order to create a vast mass of sounds that seem to closely tied together. It sounds really good, but sometimes also a bit too long, such as in the longest piece,
'The Unfathomable Yearning Of Carving The Void'. Sometimes, so it seems to me, things could have used a bit more editing, which would have brought just that extra bit of tension to the music.
The way it sounds now, it seems that Garcia, who did the mix, wanted to use all of the sounds that were captured on tape. These sixty-one minutes could have been a stronger forty-five or less minutes, I think. But in terms of improvised music that sounds a bit different, a bit moodier and atmospheric, then this is absolutely the right place to be. Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly)

On Golden Towers and Electric Frictions (CS 386 CD), Miguel teams up with the French sax player Sébastien Branche, the guitarist Abdul Moimême, and the string players Ernesto Rodrigues (viola) and Guilherme Rodrigues (cello). Not counting Abdul’s amplified axe, Miguel is the only electronics guy in the room, and he reins himself in for this subdued, low-key set of lengthy exploratory tones played in the electro-acoustic manner. The title ‘Ivory Frequencies Across A Drained Landscape’ is the most evocative description on offer here; all of these pieces feel like emptied-out, desolate descriptions of one empty vista after another. What life stirs in these post-devastation lands? Very little, it seems. I like the way this ad-hoc quintet move as one, and the collective noise they make is very palatable, but I’m not feeling much tension or indeed any of the promised “frictions” of the title. The set was done in a single day, and John Klima did the recordings in a Lisbon studio. Ed Pinsent (The Sound Projector)