"Ernesto Rodrigues has continued to release several new albums over the past couple of weeks, including some recorded in 2018: Given his usual very fast release pace, that seems like a while ago for Rodrigues, but perhaps the quarantine presents an opportunity to finish some older productions that may have drifted to the back burner.... Among these, I especially want to highlight Metamorfose, recorded in Lisbon in December 2018 by the duo of Rodrigues (on both violin and viola) and Carlos Santos (live electronics).

Rodrigues and Santos, frequent collaborators in various groups, had already released the duo album Piano (as mentioned here in August 2017 and January 2019), and in involving a single instrument between them, it also included distinct roles, i.e. Santos at the keyboard and Rodrigues manipulating the strings inside. Roles are distinct on Metamorfose too, with Rodrigues playing violin or viola and Santos manipulating the sound via various timbral disarticulations and echoes, but while Piano never really "sounds like a piano," Metamorfose sounds like a traditional string instrument much of the time: Indeed, the magical parts of the performance are the sudden and disorienting realizations of what seems like a violin being revealed to have been slowly and almost imperceptibly transformed into something else - more than a violin.

At times, then, there is some "real" electronic counterpoint, or more often various drones (whether above or below the texture) and echoes, but such involvements tend to be oriented around what mostly seems to be a solo string performance. And that soloistic character is also what makes Metamorfose such a striking release for Rodrigues, as his prolific contributions are often buried within various broader textures: Here they're usually front and center, though, opening with what sounds like trickling water and moving through various waves of (usually) continuous transformation, sometimes grainy and sometimes into a shimmering spaciness via high position harmonics and electronic processing in turn.... (The soloistic quality can be compared with that of the recent trio album Multiforms, as discussed here in May, albeit there in a more typically energetic free jazz setting.

In contrast, the various figures and transformations of Metamorfose do not suggest a specific prior idiom....) The sometimes subtle electronics thus serve to proliferate and ramify string figures into a variety of textures, some more expansive - not so unlike the various transformations and wave-like complexifications animating Setubal (and some other newer productions, as recently noted), there becoming more expansive and forceful via multiple acoustic instruments. The greater sense of concentration and economy - albeit boosted by electronics at various points - suggests a more specific tour-de-force on Metamorfose then, including through a variety of techniques highlighting the violin in quasi-traditional ways. (One might e.g. recall extremes of technical duration and harmonics in e.g. Irvine Arditti's "naked" performances of Cage's late violin works with their long held tones, but here a wobble can lead in turn to exposing a detail of string grain explicitly or an entire spectrum of timbre via further electronic interrogation....)

In that, it's not so different from some other duo albums featuring live electronics/sampling around a traditional instrument, e.g. as recalled here around Elective Affinities just this past March... where it's also a matter of multiplying the resources of the instrument, including while often leaving it recognizable. In this, Metamorfose further suggests a sense of evolutionary becoming and even liminality per se (more so than e.g. a travelogue, as posited around some other productions) via extended variation - and marks a new vision of contemporary violin/viola solo performance in the process: In short, it becomes its own world."-Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts