CD Feature/ Pablo Reche, Ubeboet: Duae"
TobiasThe first time I listened to this album, a big truck was standing in front of my window. While I thought I was enjoying the deep drones of “duae”, it was really the sounds of the motor running outside, which trickled in through the glass and superimposed the actual music. Which means that you’ll not only have to listen attentively to get something out of this, but to find an undisturbed place which allows for these tracks to exist at all.
And yet, “lower case” is too narrow a box to fit this international collaboration between Spanish artist Miguel Tolosa (Ubeboet) and Argentinian Pablo Reche released on established German experimental outfit Retinascan. By definition, this genre (which goes back to Steve Roden and his seminal “Forms of Paper” album on 12K) is occupied as much with subliminal sounds as with silence as well as with the border region where it is becoming hard to tell one from the other. “Duae”, however, is not interested in tricking the mind or questioning the process of listening on a metaphysical level. Already the razorsharp pad, deep pulse and flickering harmonics of the opening title “Urbs” placed just underneath the usual level of volume indicate that this is a music which stays underneath the radar, because it grows better in the shade than in the sun. It is only in the pivotal “Graviter”, a thirteen minute hollowland of hardly audible rumblings, which roars like an earthquake fivethousand miles away inside a perfect vacuum scraping along the surface of absolute nothingness that it is hard to tell when and if something is happening at all. In any case, the effect is not one of estrangement, but one of coziness and familiarity: Once the initial scepicism has been overcome, the sounds suddenly feel as warm as a fireplace instead of appearing as threatening as their alien nature might have suggested. The focus needed to appreciate them also lead one deeper into a cavern of absolute concentration, from whence the monochromatic drones, cello-like string reverberations and mysterious train puffings of “Circum” or the translucent machineries of “Natura Duce” can be savoured in crystaline clarity.
It may take some time to get to like this album. At first, it comes close to being nothing more than a sceletised Dark Ambient record played at low volume. But the more it spins in your player, the more it releases its energy and reveals its plasticity. Which explains why it fits the retinascan vision of “visible music” so well and why it blends harmonously with truck noises outside one’s window. An album with a lot of discovery space, that much is certain.
By Tobias Fischer
Homepage: Pablo Reche
Homepage: Pablo Reche at MySpace
Homepage: Ubeboet
Homepage: Uebeboet at MySpace
Homepage: Retinascan Records
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