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Monteiro, Alfredo Costa / Miguel A. Garcia: Aq'Ab'Al (Mikroton Recordings)

Audio experimenters Alfredo Costa Monteiro and Miguel A. Garcia join forces in an album titled after "Aq'ab'al", the Mayan Astrology Sign about polar opposites--dawn and dusk, hot and cold, black and white--which represents renewal and change, through a series of opposing audio events, forceful sounds of texture, feedback, and intervention.
 

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Alfredo Costa Monteiro-electronics

Miguel A. Garcia-electronics


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UPC: 5056124611320

Label: Mikroton Recordings
Catalog ID: cd 57
Squidco Product Code: 24001

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2017
Country: Russia
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded by Miguel A. Garcia.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"The second appearance of Alfredo Costa Monteiro after critically acclaimed Contour with Keith Rowe, Kurt Liedwart and Ilia Belorukov, and the first physical release of Miguel A. Garcia after Uropygi with Kurt Liedwart, Ilia Belorukov and Dmitry Krotevich on Mikroton Digital.

The album is titled after "Aq'ab'al", the Mayan Astrology Sign about polar opposites - dawn and dusk, hot and cold, black and white which represents renewal, change, the end of boredom or new beginnings. The album takes off into the territory of spectral modulation of an array of sound waves and intrusions of abrupt shifts in the flow. A forceful energy that seems to be constrained, captured into a muffled atmosphere. Ebbs and flows of the circulation of sound waves, mixed with ferocious textural feedbacks configurate a kind of a primary vibration, combined with high pitch chord sounds seem to draw a kind of strange observance. The music is always in constant movement, avoiding stops and giving no respite in its search for new beginnings."-Mikroton



This album has been reviewed on our magazine:

The Squid
The Squid's Ear!

Artist Biographies

"Alfredo Costa Monteiro was born in 1964 in Porto (Portugal)

Lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

He studied sculpture/installation at the fine art school in Paris with Christian Boltanski.In 1992, he moved to Barcelona. Since then, his work stands somewhere between visual arts, visual poetry and sound. His installations and sound pieces, all of a low-fi character, have in common an interest for unstable processes, raw materials and gestures, where the manipulation of objects as instruments or instruments as objects has a strong phenomenological aspect.

From 1998 to 2006, he was member of espai 22a, an independent collective for contemporary art. From 2001 to 2006, he was also member of IBA col.lectiu d'improvisació

In sound poetry, he performs in solo polyglot and noise pieces ( portuguese, french and spanish), where sound establishes a different semantics.

Ongoing sound projects: Cremaster (with Ferran Fages), i treni inerti (with Ruth Barberán), Atolón (with Ferran Fages and Ruth Barberán), Astero (with Juan Matos Capote), 300 basses (with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci) and duos with Pascal Battus, Tim Olive and Michel Doneda.

He has given workshops at Hangar (Barcelona, Spain), ESDI (Barcelona, Spain), Janácek Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Brno, Czech Republic), Arteleku (San Sebastián, Spain), Facultad de Bellas Artes, (Pontevedra, Spain), ESAD (Caldas da Rainha, Portugal), Crossroads during John Cage's Year, (Lublin, Poland) among others.

He has toured in Canada, Japan and Europe."

-Alfredo Costa Monteiro Website (http://www.costamonteiro.net/index.php?/bio/)
5/7/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Miguel A. García has been active for over two decades and with a discography that exceeds ten albums (presenting which he has toured Europe, America and Asia, performing at no less than the Issue Project Room in New York, the National Arts Centre in Mexico City, the Ftarri in Tokyo, the DOM Cultural Center in Moscow, the Église Saint-Merry in Paris or the National Auditorium of Music in Madrid), is a reference in experimental music and sound art, both for his work as a composer and for his career in the electroacoustic improvisation scene. During his career, the artist from Bilbao has collaborated with names such as Fernando Carvalho, Francisco López, Francisco Meirino, Ibon RG, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Juan Carlos Blancas or Seijiro Murayama, as well as curating events and festivals such as the Zarata Fest, the Hotsetan at Azkuna Zentroa or the legendary and extinct Club Le Larraskito. An immaculate career, in short, to which this work before us is now added. A double album with which the Basque artist has managed to lucidly convey the vital moment in which he finds himself and give shape to this timeless and genuinely avant-garde artistic artefact, called "Littentula".

Like a modern Prometheus but using as raw material the documentation of his own capture processes (both for timbre synthesis and for composition), in this new album García signs an intimate and attractive invitation to sublimation, through pieces that are abstract by nature and that display a brutal sensitivity. A stimulating challenge, which has been orchestrated with musician friends of the stature of Garazi Gorostiaga, Enrike Hurtado and Garazi Navas in mind, who have turned his scores into a major work that transcends genres and is divided into two twin volumes, united by a new artificial beauty conceived from the genes of the old world.

In the first album of "Littentula", García acts as the creator of an authentic sound stage, where the transmuted organic takes us back to the cycle of regeneration of nature. The four tracks that make up the album are developed from an intriguing metric of the beats, which manages to stimulate and expand our perception of the hidden face of the apparent. In the second, this pre-conscious logic ends up deriving into a kind of slow motion convulsion, a deafened, veiled, latent and strangely intense spasm, through which we come to intuit that the dawn and the dusk are manifested in the object of creation. A beautiful game of mirrors, with which Miguel A. García presents before us the most essential intrinsic double opposite: Life."

-Repetido (https://repetidor.org/ediciones/littentula/)
5/7/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. No'j 11:04

2. Und 8:45

3. Toj 8:33

4. Sappnicran 9:59

Related Categories of Interest:


Electro-Acoustic
Sound, Noise, &c.
Duo Recordings
New in Experimental & Electronic Music

Search for other titles on the label:
Mikroton Recordings.


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