[reviews] afe092lcd
cría cuervos: vor feuerschlünden

 
chain d.l.k. []
webzine, italy, july 2007

While I've heard rumours about the repress of his recent collaboration with Bradley, Maggi makes it on Afe and frankly known both the label and the musician it was just a matter of time before it could have happened.

Taking for granted Cría Cuervos' music can be easily filed in the "dead serious" category one could have imagined a drone oriented release, this is much more post-industrial/"music concrete" style instead, and Maggi puts the emphasis on brain bombing right from the start.

"Vor Feuerschlünden" slowly grows building up tension from white noise and delayed "natural" (from what I can guess) noises and if sometimes in the past this musician's "modus operandi" made me think about Lopez, here he could be Organum pushed to the extreme consequences.

The field recordings he loops making it all become cyclical is retrieved all of a sudden leaving the stillness of an hi-pitched, hi-power wall of noise, sure it can make you think to Merzbow but Maggi is less muscular and more anal if you get what I mean. While you think the track is gonna be over in a few seconds he stretches the final as the listening was nothing but a path of resistance a la "leave you hopes".

Sticking to my impression this Cría Cuervos' effort is more Organum-oriented, there's this post ambiental feel gone bad that's recurring also in the second movement. This time you have a low register drone and an electronic buzzing that creeps from one an ear to the other playing the stereophonic game that gives more and more the impression you're drowning into an audio-swamp.

There's an hi-psychedelic feel in the second track ("Blutgebell") even more than in the opening chapter, perhaps it has to do with the constant drone that dopes your brain cells with the first half of the suite. But though being blatantly attracted from sobriety and minimalism, Maggi is meticulously planning the heavy trip: the drone "in the middle" from cyclical becomes uniform, monumental and there's a some pitch/colour/effect and creates a break since later some mechanical and hi-pitched layers start moving in the backyard.

The atmosphere is heavy as usual, but as I've said at the beginning of the review Cría Cuervos music is far from being easy. Not that his previous releases were so hyper-structured or open to a whole world of melody, but lately Maggi is reducing everything to basics erasing superfluous things, by some means it's like the protagonist of that old Roger Corman movie titled "The Man With the X-Ray Eyes", he ends up seeing just skeletons in place of humans.

[Andrea Ferraris]

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