An immersive album of collective sound from the Portugues quintet of Ernesto Rodrigues on viola, Guilherme Rodrigues on cello, Nuno Torres on alto saxophone, Eduardo Chagas on trombone, and Carlos Santos on computer, developing rich sonic environments of great detail and intense patience, a tremendous journey that rewards the careful listener.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2015 Country: Portugal Packaging: Jewel Case Recorded at Scratch Built Studio, Lisbon, Portugal, on March 14th, 2015, by John Klima.
"Surfaces is a quintet album featuring regular Rodrigues collaborators Guilherme Rodrigues on cello, Nuno Torres on alto (also paired with Rodrigues in the Lisbon half of the quartet on Nor), Eduardo Chagas on trombone (also on Cloud Voices, which includes the previously unknown to me Joao Madeira on bass), and Carlos Santos on computer and synth (who does Creative Sources's recent graphic design): So it's a quintet of players rather close to the elder Rodrigues, and was recorded a mere six days after Cloud Voices, also in Lisbon in March.
Surfaces - whose title I don't really understand, given the sound production from volumes (one-d) strings - projects something of a similar sound world, but here it really pushes forward, rather than evoking the fragility of a cloud. The momentum can be slow and subtle, perhaps largely from the electronics, but inexorable, and becomes both the strength and weakness of the album (at least within its context). The liner notes explicitly invoke the "writerly" text, and there's a kind of Scelsian continuity, perhaps suggesting political emergence: The focus here is on emergence, then, rather than the disavowal of Nor. For all of its sporadic echoing, it comes off as ultimately irresistible."-Todd McComb, Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts