A live recording from Portugal's Cine-Theatre Curvo-Semedo of the minimal ea-improv quartet of trumpeter Axel Dorner, violist Ernesto Rodrigues, prepared electric guitarist Abdul Moimeme, and Ricardo Guerreiro on computer.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2012 Country: Portugal Packaging: Jewel Tray Recorded live by Joao Bastos and Carlos Olivenca at Cine-Teatro Curvo Semedo, Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal on December 3rd, 2011.
"It was Plato who wrote, "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city will tremble," but then, Plato lived, by our standards, in a very small city, one that - with its distinguished plays, music and mysteries - we might readily confuse with a theatre, a concert hall, a place of worship, a site less lived-in than designated for ritualized performances, a place that might mark borderlines, whether between the old mode and the new, the sacred and profane, the place before and after bells, a place isolated within a larger building, like a minimalist's large-scale appropriation of Russian nesting dolls, like this performance in the town of Montemor-o-Novo some 300 miles south of Montemor-o-Velho, that is, "the old main hill," and some hundreds of miles north-west from that other room in the midst of which has been placed (box-like) a cathedral, a kind of Tennessee jar ("round it was, upon a hill"), but here in the Cine-Theatre Curvo-Semedo the performance is so intimate the theatre itself must be excluded and a new relationship installed, the audience instead gathered on stage with the musicians and the curtain then drawn to create a "black box" effect, the ceiling exceedingly high, the air cold, the bells distant, the fabula unfolding from the instruments in a way that can be neither translated nor precisely misunderstood (various secret passages present themselves; connections, routings are magnified: the trumpet's brass tubes are moving granaries; the wound wires of guitar and viola grow train-tracks in space; minutiae mask themselves and slither seductively in computer circuitry), but later, when the fabula reaches its inevitable conclusion, we all - audience, musicians, and shared air alike - discover the black box and the folds of its cloth walls no longer there, and that we can't leave, that we can never find ourselves outside of them."-Stuart Broomer