CD – Mikroton

Angélica Castelló and Jérôme Noetinger are not new names in the international experimental scenes. Castelló is a Mexican composer and sound artist, famous for her musical research on themes such as fragility, the world of dreams and the subconscious. Noetinger is a French electroacoustic composer and improviser, the founder of the label Metamkine and a lover of performance contamination between exploited cinema and multimedia. This is their first partnership but their style confluences are clear from the initial score and title track of the whole project, Disturbio. The result is a coagulation of electroacoustic pulses, full of swallows, ticks, breaks and restarts. From a video of the duo, we discover the sources of these sounds. The duo has purposely interrupted the magnetic tapes of a reel record, probably a Revox, placed horizontally, and manipulated the reception of a radio, using other recorded sources or a contrabass recorder, an impressive but barely known tool (within the narrow circles of specialists it’s called also a paetzold). Despite the unusual set up, the musicians give the feeling they have been playing together for ages. The reason for this harmony is a specific method they use to question the nature of sounds, a thought process that must be created in a instantaneous way but which, at the same time, needs to be effectively recognizable as a primeval art form when the audience listens to it. The seven album tracks are all equally dense with no gaps in their energy. We would say that the alternation of powerful and relaxed moments in some passages don’t negatively affect the work, but instead could be defined as the result of the great control and management of their materials.

 

Angélica Castelló & Jérôme Noetinger – Disturbio