"A double bassist, João Madeira , and a cellist, Miguel Mira, each perform solo for over 16 minutes, and together they play a duo for 38 minutes, including an encore of over four minutes. This is all released by João's excellent label, 4Darecords, which is full of wonderful surprises and truly remarkable pieces.

Like the masterful, evolving drone played with the bow in a single, flawless stroke, delicate gestures in the minute changes of finger position on the fingerboard and the vibration of the bow hair. But this transcends mere stylistic flourish; it's a formal exploration of a carefully constructed and conceived structure, with almost imperceptible crescendos and decrescendos, and a sonic dynamic that swells the sound with true precision.

Then the bow dances, initiating beats that suggest one of those traditional dances buried deep in collective memory. You hear the heel touch the floor until the friction growls, swells, or recedes, finally doubling/tripling the cadence or fluttering a harmonic, the finger bouncing on the fingerboard until those distinguished and airy pizzicati unfold with the appropriate slowness. It sounds as simple as it is superbly controlled. A beautiful piece.

The cellist's art lies in following João's finale, evoking the spirit of what preceded it by striking the strings in a way that is both intimate and insistent, sometimes randomly across the surface of the strings, sometimes more expressively, following the flow of his narrative... a story of the cello as an object struck, scratched, rubbed, and made to sound, subtly adding surprise notes or irregular leaps.

In short, a sonic interrogation of the bass violin (João's instrument is a double bass). A caesura and a saturated bow on the vibrating string create a striking contrast, followed by a murmur of persistent friction in the shadow of the fingerboard, played in a slow crescendo to a firm mezzo-forte. Like his colleague, he explores a hieratic and introspective sonic range within the instrument's expressive field, demonstrating an undeniable mastery that makes you love their music.

It's no surprise that these two deploy their effects in an offbeat duo with shifting, lyrical forms, yet irregular in time, much like João Madeira 's introduction of elastic, rubbery pizzicato. The bow striates the cello strings, saturating the space above the bassist's curved ostinato.

These two are part of a large family of Portuguese string players revealed in the wake of violinist Carlos Zingaro, violist Ernesto Rodrigues, cellist Guilherme Rodrigues, bassists Hernani Faustino and Alvaro Rosso and others who cross paths in numerous bowed string ensembles that abound under the Creative Sources label.

There is, therefore, a family spirit, a desire for dialogue, contrasts, and coherence. Here, we forget which of the cellist and the double bassist is searching, implementing, drifting, fading into the background, striking, grating, or soaring.

A quest for forms, sounds, strikes, crackles, harmonics, and frenzied rumblings stumbles, gasps, forces its way through destiny, and makes the resonating bellies of the two large violins creak. Frankly, it's a success, without redundancy, and straight to the point."-Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg