Fifteen minutes of processed urban field recordings (Buenos Aires, La Plata), subway stations and electric devices. The composers specify that these metropolitan landscapes were captured at late night and in the evenings, and it shows: the music is indeed shrouded by a veil of foggy dampness, in spite of the noticeable details. A very well made grouping of sources, a substantial choice of succeeding events that testifies to Calarco and Juárez’s keen ears and sensibility; yet I can’t help but thinking that there’s absolutely nothing that strikes a nerve, or that is conspicuous enough to separate this work from the thousands that are being released today in this sonic area. This doesn’t cancel the fact that that Termosistor is an entirely pleasant, brief trip haloed by dim lights.
Massimo Ricci
TEMPORARY FAULT [ITA]
Playing in the inaudible field of music seems to become more popular these days. Now from Argentina the two musicians Juan Josè Calarco & Adrián Juárez present their own take on this subject in music. Termosistor is a welcome piece of music exploring silence and field recordings.
Not so long ago I had the pleasure of listening to a 3" cdr release by FOURM released on the Italian label Koyuki. This was a nice introduction to this young label. Now a second release has found it's way to my ears. Termosistor by Juan Josè Calarco & Adrián Juárez is a fifth in a series of digital releases.
For this release these two Argentinian musicians have made several field-recordings from Buenos Aires, which the processed and reworked into a 15 minute piece that needs very loud playback. When I first listened to it, on a normal volume, almost no sounds appeared. In an almost Lopezian tradition this piece is focused around inaudibility. Though, beneath this inaudibility lies quite some hidden beauty in a similar approach as Jos Smolders on his album Gaussian Transient (Megaphone). Mechanical sounds have been combined with those of nature creating a soft, but dense experience.
A really nice piece of music with the right length that you should miss out on. It's free, as I should say as a Dutchman.
Sietse van Erve
EARLABS [USA]
Two of Argentina’s leading Sound Artists have joined forces for a second time to record an EP which represents a factual status quo of the still nascent experimental scene of their country. Freely available from the Koyuki Sound Label, “Termosistor” by Adrian Juarez and Juan Jose Calarco is a single, continous piece culled from field recordings realised in Buenos Aires and La Plata. Capturing the sounds of late-night streets, subways stations and “electrical devices” of an unspecified nature, the result is an eery, unreal, yet strangely consoling soundscape, panning threedimensionally into all directions. As on their previous encounter “Tierra Abierta” on Resting Bell, the duo works with suprisingly active dynamics, always balancing at the edge of a space which consciously blurres the borders between what is “real” and what is “virtual”, between the physical reality surrounding us and a virtual world created by almost inaudible sonic manipulation.
While “Termosistor” remains on the level of a discreet hum for most of its duration, noisy street scenes in the middle section add a touch of sudden excitement to an otherwhise dreamily floating ambient atmosphere. By publishing with Koyuki sound, a record company which has built a reputation for imaginative compositions from the realms of pure microtonality over the course of a mere four physical releases, Calarco and Juarez are sure to extend their reach well beyond their previous circles of friends and intimates.
“Termosistor” arrives at a time of busy schedules for both artists. Juarez has only recently confirmed his position as a versatile and colourful musician devoid of any fixed genre associations by offering visual artist Nathanael Archer a string of Jazz/Blues/Post-rock pieces for inspiration. Calarco, meanwhile, collaborated with two of his personal favourites, Ubeboet and Pablo Reche on three-way group effort “Music with a limited appeal”, a 20-minute journey into mysteriously undefined waters.
Tobias Fischer
TOKAFI [USA]