intersecting a cone with a plane|cs069

Ensinava a geometria euclidiana desde há mais de 2000 anos que a Terra é uma esfera e que a órbita desenhada pelo planeta à volta do sol é uma elipse. Na representação laboratorial dessa ideia, um cone projectado no espaço, cortado por um plano imaginário, também forma uma elipse. Transpondo essa experiência da física para a criação acústica, enquanto ramo da física, o trabalho com curvas sonoras que nascem da intersecção de diferentes planos e linhas imaginárias está na essência do novo disco de Ricardo Arias, Günter Müller e Hans Tammen, “Intersecting a Cone with a Plane”. Árias, Colombiano de Bogotá, radicado em Nova Iorque, o suíço Müller e o alemão Tammen improvisam com instrumentos comuns e outros menos ortodoxos, como o "bass-balloon kit", formado por pequenos balões de borracha presos a uma estrutura, tocados com as mãos ou com acessórios diversos, electrónica sortida e guitarra preparada, que Tammen designa por "endangered guitar".
As mudanças e oscilações são bastante sensíveis, o passo é lento e o restolhar quase permanente. É praticamente impossível determinar quem faz soar o quê, tal é a ilusão e a homogeneidade dos sinais emitidos, nos quais se confundem os sons electrónicos de Günter Müller, marcadamente percussivos, ou não fosse ele um percussionista que exerce essa actividade em “Intersecting a Cone with a Plane”.
Um disco-instalação sonora que apresenta alguns dos sinais caracterizadores e representativos das correntes actuais da música improvisada de matriz europeia, um work in progress que, pessoalmente, considero dos melhores que me foi dado ouvir em 2006, nesta especialidade. Eduardo Chagas (Jazz e Arredores)

[...] An older recording can be found on the disc by old friend Günter Müller (selected percussion, mds, ipod, electronics, processing) together with the for me unknown Hans Tammen (endangered guitar, whatever that might be) and Ricardo Arias (bass-balloon kit). Ever since seeing Judy Dunaway playing balloons, I love the sound of it. The music was recorded in 2003 in New York and is simply great. Largely electronically sounding, this is an album of intense fields of sound, charged with electricity, small explosions on the guitar (an endangered species perhaps) and all sorts of sounds balloons can produce. The best release so far. Frans de Waard (Vital)

On this excellent release Ricardo Arias plays a bass-balloon kit ("a number of rubber balloons attached to a suitable structure and played with the hands and a set of accessories, including various kinds of sponges, pieces of Styrofoam, rubber bands, etc"), Günter Müller is featured on his customary selected percussion, mds, iPod, electronics and processing and Hans Tammen mangles his "endangered" guitar. You'll search in vain for a wall to bash your head against, blood pummelling your temples into a dull ache, as huge rumbling bubbles host a gathering of a million squeaking mice against a backdrop of earthquake and thunder. Cybertermites munch their way through your floorboards over a Jackmanesque wave of harmonics and low-frequency interference, irregular convulsions perched nervously above Tammen's extra-terrestrial tampoura, and the music crumbles and splinters into a cauldron of earth loop and suffocated volume swells. Your padded cell has been invaded by a battery of radioactive rats, tiny irregular heartbeats amplified in sickening, Chernobyl-like oppression. Don't try to understand. Massimo Ricci (Paris Transatlantic)

Bardzo udana plyta nagrana przed ponad trzema laty w Nowym Jorku przez trójke doswiadczonych improwizatorów: Ricardo Ariasa, Güntera Müllera i Hansa Tammena. Improwizacja elektroakustyczna w wydaniu tego tria to wartki strumien dzwieków elektronicznych oraz "akustycznych, lecz brzmiacych z elektroniczna". Cos nieustannie stuka, pulsuje, trzeszczy, brzeczy, buczy, swiergoce....
Muzycy zaskakujaco konsekwentnie w zalozonej przypadkowosci lacza ze soba te wszystkie mikro- i makro-eksplozje, stukoty i szmery, warkoty i piski. Zestawiaja je w rozmaitych konfiguracjach, nie zapominajac o zachowaniu równowagi pomiedzy poszczególnymi planami dzwiekowymi. A ze dbaja tez o forme oraz strukture kazdego z trzech nagran, to jasnym sie staje, ze po ten material naprawde warto siegnac. Tadeusz Kosiek (Gaz-Eta)

Inhabiting the realm of live electroacoustics, this trio recording fully illustrates its zeitgeist through an encounter of extended instruments, various electronic processes and objects through the superimposition of transparent layers of an overt textural inclination that keep surfacing as others recede. Pedro Lopez (Modisti)

From the same label is Intersecting a Cone with a Plane, featuring a fascinating trio comprised of Ricardo Arias (bass-balloon kit), Günter Müller (selected percussion, mini-discs, iPod, electronics, processing), and Hans Tammen (endangered guitar). It’s a subtle record, with two long improvisations bookending a shorter one. Müller continues to become ever more exacting in his creation of templates and frames, though this way of thinking inaccurately consigns him to background gestures. With very little fat or excess, he can set the tone for groups in ways that are both recognizable and elusive: an abstracted percussive rumble or the most distant sine sizzle. Tammen plays with near self-abnegation here, a crackle, a detuned E-string, a rough bludgeoning every so often. And who really knows which sounds Arias produces – likely the wet squiggles and sawing. Together they come up with some very stimulating stuff: an insect colony plugged into a massive generator in your backyard, a ringing loop like a snippet of Rosy Parlane or Fennesz blared out from a passing car, a resonating metal braid coming undone, or a black electric cloud courtesy of Tammen’s lovely glinting bow work and the delicate, woody chorus from Arias. Another good one. Jason Bivins (Dusted)

"...Dancing about architecture," the phrase usually attributed to Frank Zappa regarding music writing, feels more apt when describing this superb electroacoustic improv outing by three musicians who certainly know their way around a space. Besides Müller's usual toolbox of percussion, mini-discs, iPods, and electronics/processing, his foils on this session are unusual to say the least, every bit as galvanizing to say the most. Ricardo Arias trumps what is listed on the inlay as "bass-balloon kit," not exactly an "instrument" that is commonplace at these improv summit meetings; Hans Tammen shears away at "endangered guitar," probably so-nicked due to the instrument's sounding nigh on unrecognizable in this company. Regardless, the trio make mincemeat of the architectonic habitué where they were sequestered (Harvestworks, in New York City), erecting a bracing noise that comes at the listener from right angles, across fibrous surfaces, situated at reference points inhabiting countless alien cartographies.
Certainly the disc title leaves little mystery about the artist's intentions; rather, the mystery resides in how each improviser deems what is necessary to flesh out the stark sonic arithmetic inherent in the title's phraseology. Wow and flutter become vital components, particularly as the group dynamics of "A Spherical Triangle" announce themselves directly in the opening seconds. Amid Müller's synthetic buzzes and flurry of effects and his few well-parsed snare taps, Arias emits some of his own calibrated squeaks, while Tammen makes the landscape appear even more brittle thanks to the warring cries of that aberrant guitar. Actually, as the piece gains momentum and the sparks fly (figuratively and literally), it's difficult to discern who is responsible for what; in such a sound world, where the elliptical plane is never quite glimpsed because of the artist's constant blurring of the emergent, one either tries to second-guess what arises, or simply succumbs to the quicksand-like morass on display. It's a wholly immersive nexus of events that the trio build upon, as electronic burps and blips shimmer, tensions flare briefly, the shapes mimed out take hold.
The shorter "A Lune" is far more visceral, and a bit less cerebral, than its predecessor, as if Arias, Müller, and Tammen felt the burning embers and aural crackles of their ideas (some of which is wrought by Tammen's preening strings, making their presence quite tangible amidst Arias' high-pitched wheezings) became oxygenated enough before raging out of control. The finale, "The Congruence of Triangles," probes its spatial dimensions and latent geometries much like the first piece: Müller churns out some sharply edited backwards-grooves out of his mini-discs; Arias giggles his way through a thorny bed of rubbery prongs and blisters; Tammen sends shivers along his fret board to splash messily all over Müller's digital flatbeds. Electricity curls along every contour and vector the trio navigates, asymmetrically devised, brilliantly executed. Darren Bergstein (The Squid's Ear)