Cronica must be one of the most active Portugese labels in the underground of electro-acoustic and experimental music. Two new CD?s by Paolo Raposo & Marc Behrens, and by Ran Slavin further define the musical direction of this upcoming label.
?Further Consequences of Reinterpretation? is a collaboration between the well known experimentalist Marc Behrens, and the less known Paolo Raposo. Like its title suggests it is a further interpretation and reworking of a work called ?0.000? that was once released by Japanese artist Nosei Sakata (perhaps better known as *0). The original work of Sakata contained no audible sounds, and was therefore ideally open for interpretation. The work was ?remixed? and reworked by a score of other artists, and then Marc Behrens decided to rework all of this material again. Then Raposo joined in, and everything got reworked again.
The result is a work of minimal, and sometimes noisy bits of sound that could be either organic or electronic. The sounds form a sort of minimal soundscape of seemingly random bits and pieces, that actually works quite well. It is a nice piece of extremely minimal experimental music that is really quite entertaining to listen to.
Ran Slavin?s CD is apparently meant to be a split CD with himself (an original approach I must admit). This release is also quite minimal, but contains more accessible sounds (loops and drones) from an instrumental background that form a warm, almost Mediterranean, atmosphere somewhere between the styles of Fennesz and Vance Orchestra. The overall CD is very nice, but I do not really understand why this is supposed to be a split release. The second half of the disc (the ?split? side) is a bit colder in atmosphere, but contains the same style elements used on the first half, so it is simply a CD that contains two nice works.
