A three part improvised work for viola, trombone, electric guitar and double bass from, respectively, Ernesto Rodrigues, Eduardo Chagas, Abdul Moimeme, and Joao Madeira, an ascending conversation that uses innuendo, mystery, subtle movement, silence and swells to create atmospheric environments, each "voice" shifting enigmatically in sublimely hazy ways.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2015 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Jazztras Estudio, Lisbon, Portugual, on March 8th, 2015, by Luciano Bairros.
"Cloud Voices, recorded in Lisbon in March of this year, was perhaps the most distinctive of the past six months of releases for me. The title references (perhaps) the theme - or half of it - from Clocks and Clouds, an album out of Portugal that made a bit of a splash last year. Cloud Voices, a rather long quartet album at more than an hour, eschews the mechanical (or discrete) while focusing on the cloudy. It might even be said to open with thunder, although the viola-bass-trombone combination, combined with Abdul Moimeme on prepared guitar, sticks to mostly acoustic material. (The boundary for a "pickup" isn't clear to me, since a recording inherently involves a microphone.) Whereas Rodrigues's Nor album, recorded in Berlin and featuring half Berlin-based improvisers, might be said to feature some similar sonorities, those sometimes halting and episodic tracks convey more of a human response, if only in protest (of bogus choices). Cloud Voices constructs a different sense of time, which is part of its charm, even if it can seem overly long at times. Indeed, this album leads me to posit time-scale as a basic difference between the generalized "clock" and "cloud" phenomena, with the clock occupying a temporality that makes ready sense at the human perceptual scale. In its exploration of nonlinear process, Cloud Voices also reminds me of Triple Point's Phase/transitions, although there the sound - the immersion, one might say - is more consistent. Although not superficially similar, listening to the two albums together seems to reveal some similar motivations. In the case of Cloud Voices, such exploration leads to more fragile activity, however, as processes struggle to gain momentum. (Perhaps the cloud becomes a social metaphor at that point"- Todd McComb, Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts