Michael Santos – The Happy Error

Michael Santos

CD – Baskaru
Extremely delicate harmonic passages, “clicky”, dense and slightly “gummy” acoustics, interwoven with expanded patterns, with an almost oneiric quality in the juxtaposition of crackle and melody, finally combining to give a melancholic and fluctuating character. Textures are sensibly organized and diluted in environmental drones, which generates a field of sounds that are disseminated by minimal audio signals. We hear odd and at the same time familiar juxtapositions, endless accordant successions and minimal lullabies, rendered as ultra-vivid in the elliptical progression of fatal errors. Fatal errors that are “glitches”, in their own essence. They are coherent and correspondent, with no need for an “a priori” planning. The fragmented quality provides intensity, which is added to through careful selection and deployment. The disturbances disseminate on purpose and are quite distant from traditional composition procedures. They succeed in saturating the used frequencies, nestling among the reverberation of iterations and trembling frequencies. A beautiful album; gentle, painstaking and intimate, and an important debut that may foreshadow very interesting developments.