A Glimpse to an end of a Cycle cs860

Happening to continue with the next release pairing Ernesto Rodrigues & Carlos Santos, A Glimpse to an end of a Cycle — recorded in Lisbon this January, so the first actual 2025 recording featured here — involves a similar sort of "open" feel & indeterminate electronics as La rambarde des songes, les congruences des soupirs: Versus that quintet with horn & voice, Hernâni Faustino (mainstay of the Portuguese improv scene in general...) is now the bassist, while the previously unknown Ana Albino rounds out the quartet on electric guitar/fx. (While I hadn't noted her individually, Albino has already appeared in ensemble on Caesium, also noted in the previous entry....) And although bass can be prominent in moments, the ongoing single movement tapestry here consists again more of deconstructed timbres, with no "winds" this time, but Rodrigues still on crackle box, i.e. "electronics" production remaining enigmatic across much of the quartet space.... (An apt comparison is again with the more "hybrid" quartet for Distilling Silence, i.e. with both electric guitar & clarinet — & Carla Santana on electronics instead of Santos: That album seems to explore & tease apart everyday household sounds....) A sense of mystery also plays out here in a sense of darkness, apparently starting literally with the performers (per an included photo, unless that's a digital effect I suppose...), and immediately suggests a sort of haunted landscape. There're certainly also senses of familiarity, but distended, as well as senses of continuity. Indeed, while again quiet (& able to be overwhelmed by my sometimes noisy surroundings...), it's apparently senses of continuity & anticipation that draw me into the sound world of A Glimpse to an end of a Cycle, a relatively brief album that seems sometimes to end without my noticing.... So whatever (background) "procedure" might yield the "glimpse" of the title, there can be more of a conscious sense of process at times too (again grounded in what seems to be a sort of psychic desolation... or maybe distant traffic), yielding some hocket-y counterpoint in some passages, but mostly a sense of smoothness & ongoing flow.... Per my comments on the electronics then (including previously...), there's an unknown (or inverted) sense of what I've been calling "musical economy" to proceedings such as these, or perhaps it's a matter of choosing a group based on personalities more than instrumentation...? (A synthesizer is not usually subdued....) Or of course it's the focus on relatively narrow possibilities, i.e. the flexibilities or liminalities, within what could be an instrumental combo sounding very differently.... (And again per electronics, e.g. both low hums & especially some very high twittering can be distinctive here....) In any case, A Glimpse to an end of a Cycle seems to weld Rodrigues's rather varied post-Cage investigations to his likewise frequent nocturne sojourns, yielding another understated yet highly affective (& subtly dynamic...) listening experience, sometimes more layered (than contrapuntal...), ephemeral & often wave-like. (And maybe it should be compared to Rodrigues-Santos projects from what can seem like the distant past these days, e.g. Cyclic Symmetry, reviewed here in October 2016.... Or to a growing set of offerings from various others, e.g. Nyctalopia released this month by Gaudenz Badrutt & Association Bruit....) There's also an increasing sense that these productions co-compose my own local sonic space, i.e. contextualize & sometimes dominate sounds of my surroundings (which do now sometimes feature e.g. what seem to be military helicopters, along with the familiar screaming toddlers, etc... — i.e. not always willing to be dominated). So perhaps survival in our increasingly chaotic world can come to be figured at times via softness (as it had been of course already by the Tao Te Ching...), rather than hardness — sound (at least previously, contra recording technology...) being among the most ephemeral of human artistic media. Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts