Nota Demo |cs244

The one thing that I thought was the surprise here is that a label known for it's improvised music would release a CD by someone 'using the computer', as it says on the cover. Laptops and electronics may have been part of other releases on Creative Sources Recordings, but usually in combination with other instruments. I met Gintas K years ago and he's really nice guy, but with his recent releases I must admit he lost me. Not that this isn't something to not like, as his music is quite alright, but it seems, time-wise, out of place. The eleven pieces on 'Nota Demo' sound like being improvised using max/mps, pure data, audio mulch or anything such a like, but its Ploigue Bidule, a software thing I never heard of, along with VST plug ins and a midi keyboard/controller. The input could have been anything and is no longer to be traced back to anything you heard before. It sounds a bit like the 'modern electronics' from the sixties, but then using computer techniques. Nothing wrong with that I'd say but something that you may have heard before very well. Maybe on those vintage electronic music records, maybe in the world of Vital Weekly in the last, say, fifteen years, when laptops became household objects. Like I said, I enjoy this to some extent, the whole bunch of eleven tracks, forty-three minutes, but in all honesty: who is Gintas K trying to convince here? I have no idea. This is, in 2013, perhaps the sort of 'quick' album (and I fully admit, I have no idea how it took to do an album like this) that would end on bandcamp for the real die hard fans, but as a release on CD is perhaps a bit much. Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly)

I was a little surprised to find a release by appreciated Lithuanian electronic producer Gintas Kraptavicius - we interviewed him on the occasion of the release of "Slow" for Baskaru - on the pack of records from Portuguese label Creative Sources, even if this record could be thought as an interesting assay of computer-driven improvisation. Most of the sounds have been squeezed from Bidule, an amazing modular environment by Canadian audio software company Plogue Art et Technologie Inc.: the sonorities are closer to some 60ies electronic music, but in between more or less regular computational sequences, which sometimes sound like having been crumbled, other sonic entities such as bells, spurts, gushes, gurgles and rifts suddenly appear and stain any electronic eddies. You could imagine this release as the workout of a lively kid who plays on a gigantic control panel with a plenty of mysterious knobs, bright buttons and levers or you could imagine it came from the translation of the sonic language of a computer, who got drunk after its liquid cooling system was filled with vodka. Vito Camarretta (Chain DLK)