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ficta

creative sources | cs005

Ernesto Rodrigues/violin, viola. Guilherme Rodrigues/cello, pocket trumpet. Gabriel Paiuk/piano. José Oliveira/percussion.

Recorded on 19 December 2001, at Tcha Tcha Tcha Studios, Lisbon. Total Time 46:37 © 2002. Cover design Carlos Santos

After an aseptic and extremely quiet opening, the quartet on «Ficta» expands its horizons into the ethereal world of sound creation. The two Rodrigues string players and the drummer Oliveira are Portuguese musicians, while pianist Paiuk is Argentinean; thus, they bring forth new music concepts from diverse cultures. Their set consists of six experiments in music having an atonal base and fully unstructured composition. The session proceeds tentatively with each artist testing the atmosphere with stark interjections or quiet musings. This in turn invokes periods of spontaneous blurts of temporal duration, which dissolve back to the eerie world of velvety noise. The fifth member of the group is silence.

There are periods of prolonged quietude followed by agitated manipulation of tonal output with bare otic registration. Paiuk is the most outspoken of the group. He intermittently explodes with a short burst on the piano before retreating to the nether region where they all seem to reside and spring forth. “Nihil 00.05” has examples of these outbursts, albeit constricted periods. Ernesto Rodrigues adopts abrupt plucking techniques to make his violin or viola an equal partner in this séance, while Guilherme Rodrigues bows the cello with irregular strokes of sonar-detecting quality.

Oliveira’s bells and chimes fall right in line. They speak the language of whales where high pitches and curt tones sing out in search of a response. Guilherme Rodrigues also introduces the pocket trumpet into the equation, but these periods as well are totally devoid of flow. The liner notes quote the expression “esthetics of silence”, which is descriptive of much of the disc. Perseverance will allow one to find the hidden gems buried within this music. Frank Rubolino