ANDRÉ GONÇALVES - Currents & Riptides excerpts (shhpuma records)
Also internationally known as the man behind the ADDAC Systems brand of modular synthesizers and several devices for electronic music, Portuguese sound and intermedia artist André Gonçalves is back with a new solo album, just one year after the release of “Musica Eterna – Pocket Music for the Space-Time Traveller”. Fortunately so, because he was absent from the recording world for too long (10 years!), and because “Currents & Riptides” is an absolute marvel, establishing his music as one of the most intriguing in the experimental scene. Every kind of situation you can imagine is covered here, not to show off what he can do, but emerging naturally in the flux of events: combinations of analogic and digital sounds and tools, processing of field recordings and ready-made materials (the mutant electric guitar you can recognize because he wants you to), explorations of provoked or casual accidents, ambient soundscapes, noise, textures in constant change, immersive and insistent drones, you name it. When Gonçalves arrives to something beautiful and pleasing, he can’t resist to act against it with a rough contrast, like an ugly feedback or a cable violently taken out. André Gonçalves may not appear much, even in concert, but when he does, in Portugal or somewhere else, is for maximum effect. This is one of those occasions. Behind him he has a long background, alone or with other people, playing under designations like OK Suitcase, Last Time This Happened We Had a Street Party, Stapletape, Gigantiq, Feltro and more. He likes to do laboratorial work, shaping structures, but also to improvise, and he did it Achim Wollscheid, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Casper Klausen, David Maranha, Eric La Casa, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Kenneth Kirschner, Manuel Mota, Michel J. Schumacher, Ernesto Rodrigues, Richard Garet, Phill Niblock, Sei Miguel and Tim Hecker between many others. It’s impossible to say if this music was produced in studio or freely improvised: sometimes it seems something meticulously composed, and other times it comes like the crude result of spontaneity. That doubt is what seduces us, knowing that the reverse is also highly probable. With him, we never know.