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Alfredo Costa Monteiro, "Epicycle"
As an artist whose work often crosses the boundaries into the visual as well as the audio, it is interesting to hear a music only work from Monterio. His dedication to working with singular sound sources through an album's worth of material may call to mind other artists such as Akifumi Nakajima (Aube) in approach, but the results are in a world of their own. Here, using only the sound of his voice, the artist creates a frightening soundscape that still maintains a conventional, almost musical feel to it.
Previous recordings involving paper and accordions as source material makes it clear that Monteiro is adventurous to say the least. But here, using only his voice and processing, he creates a tense, violent world of sound that hangs with the best of "extreme" musicians without feeling like a rip-off or a poser. Instead, subtle shifting walls of drone electronic sounds are met by outbursts of pure modulated anger, screams cutting through the thick tense air. At other times the drone is layered with sinister organic elements, what could be guttural groans or the sound of breath that sound like something threatening just over the horizon where it cannot be seen, but its presence clearly felt.
I mentioned a sense of musicality in the introduction to this review, and it does clearly manifest itself in the structure of the work. Rather than feeling like a slipshod collection of sounds slapped together, it instead feels composed and tactfully planned out, from quiet interludes into harsh, noise outbursts that wouldn't be out of place on a Merzbow record, back to more pensive passages that cause the listener to more closely contemplate the darkness.
My previous reference to Aube was not a simple point of comparison, because both artists have that same raison d'etre when it comes to obsessively using and manipulating a rudimentary sound source as a basis of composition, but structurally is where they depart. Perhaps due to his prolificness, Nakajima often relied on the same overreaching framework on his tracks that made them somewhat tedious. Monteiro, on the other hand, has a much more dynamic flow that causes the listener to be genuinely surprised when the sound shifts from subtle to brutal. I know I caught myself being jarred on more than one occasion with the forceful transition.
The fact that this is all sourced from the human voice makes it even more interesting, knowing that such dark and tense sounds lurk within everyone, just needing to be coaxed out and given a tiny bit of electronic treatment. Perhaps the metaphor can be made that the work represents the dark, disturbed element that lies just beneath the surface of everyone, but regardless of how it is interpreted, it's a great listen.
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