Finnish guitarist Lauri Hyvarinen joins Portugues Creative Sources collective members Ernesto Rodrigues on viola, Abdul Moimeme on electric guitar, and Carlos Santos on synthesizer, for a studio album whose title refers to the shell of an object, a mysterious reference peeled away by this quartet through subliminal playing of intense technique and concentration.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2018 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Namouche Studio, Lisbon, Portugal, on December 4th, 2017, by Joaquim Monte.
"Besides classical string albums, Rodrigues also continues to be very active with ensembles including electric guitar and/or electronics more generally: Indeed, for me the most ear-catching of his recent albums has been Kuori, a relatively short production from Lisbon in December 2017 featuring Lauri Hyvärinen & Abdul Moimême on electric guitars, with Carlos Santos on synthesizer joining Rodrigues to form a quartet. Moimême recently appeared (in October) in this space with Dissection Room (a non-Rodrigues Creative Sources album recorded four days after Kuori), and has been a regular participant on the label.
I was not previously familiar with Finnish guitarist Hyvärinen (b.1986), however, although perhaps I should have been: He's recorded with Colectivo maDam (whose album with Rodrigues, Coluro, has been a favorite), as well as with e.g. guitarist Sandy Ewen (about whom more soon) & drummer Andrew Drury (yielding the duo album The Islands, recorded this past April, and appearing on Drury's Different Track Recordings).
Kuori is another rather sparse album, as seems to be typical of Hyvärinen as well, but is occasionally loud or intrusive with its fascinating & detailed timbral combinations. It thus projects something of an ambient character (perhaps recalling e.g. Rodrigues' acoustic Sîn), but also involves a variety of extreme pitches, from very low to very high, usually subtly. There's occasionally something of a "spacey" quality as a result, and in fact I was reminded of an image like "Distant Radio Transmissions," which happens to be a Roscoe Mitchell title. (In this case, the title is in Finnish, meaning a shell or casing, as are the track names.)
The sometimes prominent ringing & "echo chamber" effects yield that sometimes "distant" impression... sometimes over or across what seems to be a windswept landscape. Despite (or maybe because of) the usual quiet, an intense feeling of ritual gravity is also projected. (The resulting framing & sparseness is indeed more evocative of the timbral spanning of Coluro than it is of e.g. Skiagraphía, which is more "centered" & continuous in tonal sweep, despite the relatively less timbral variety - even rigor - of Kuori.)
Needless to say, it's also difficult to grasp who is doing what, particularly amid the electronic manipulations, but the resulting sound is (consequently) quite coherent. It's also quite distinctive, despite involving a quartet of mostly known performers, so I'll have to keep an ear on Hyvärinen now."-Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts