Soundcards From Chile

text

This is the second release on the Portuguese label AnAnAnA' s Not Only National series, which, it's my guess, is their own peculiar take on the whole notion of world music. (A quick word about AnAnAnA: based in Lisbon, they're building up a very nice catalogue of all kinds of esoterica - ambient, soundscaping, contemporary composition - which would seriously puts some more established labels to shame. Our faves so far have included guitarist/composer Rafael Toral's Sound Mind Sound Body and Nuno Rebelo's Azul Esmeralda.) Soundcards from Chile genuinely subverts the idea of environmental field recordings. Composer and guitar player Ramuntcho Matta (son of painter Roberto) was commissioned by the 1998 Lisbon Expo Chilean Pavilion to provide a sound installation of sounds recorded in Chile itself. The recordings Ramuntcho made are themselves pretty extraordinary, location recordings made in the city and the countryside, recordings of conversations, animal sounds, traditional Indian music and so on. But Matta and Takahashi have used these as the source material for some astonishing experiments in musique concrete. Apparently, for the pavilion's installation, the music/soundscape was played back from 12 CDs played randomly on a multi-speaker; naturally, it's been impossible for them to recreate that kind of experience on this CD, but they have managed to convey a sense of movement, disorientation and density. To find pure "music" and ambient location recording this satisfyingly fused is rare indeed; it can only be a complement that it reminded me, at times of Aka-Darbari-Java period Jon Hassell, of Brian Eno's On-Land and, in more contemporary terms a bizarre cross of Paul Schütze's Sitework projects and Oval. A record at once intriguing, beautiful and challenging.