[releases] afe092lcd
cría cuervos: vor feuerschlünden

Track List:

1.  Vor Feuerschlünden  20:49

2.  Blutgebell  26:41

Description:

Cría Cuervos is the music project of italian sound artist Eugenio Maggi. Influenced by surrealism, minimalism, Drone and Industrial music, Hard Core/Punk and Grind, his music has evolved from more noisy experiments and now sits somewhere in between darker ambience and electroacoustic.

During the years he created several full-lenght solo works and also collaborated with artist such as Paul Bradley, Sparkle in Grey, Ninth Desert and Maurizio Bianchi.

His music was released on many international labels: Immanence, Thisco, Mystery Sea, Taalem, Twenty Hertz and Dielectric Records.

"Vor Feuerschlünden" (...German for "Before Throats of Fire"...) is Cría Cuervos's latest full-lenght offering and it probably is his best solo work to date.

The album features two long tracks of electroacoustic / experimental nature, built using field recordings (...cicadas, gas, frogs, water...), self-programmed Theta waves, short waves and softwares. No synthesizers were used during the recording process.

The title track really blown up our minds when we listened to it for the first time, and it still manages to obtain the same result one year later, even after repeated listenings.

It fades in very quietly with reverbered noises which build up a solid high-pitched drone that is later paired with colonies of chirping insects. Low rumbles are also introduced until the different parts slowly fill the whole audio spectrum without leaving any frequency unexplored.

With "Vor Feuerschlünden" Cría Cuervos successfully creates a sort of wall of concrète noise whose peak is reached around the fifteenth minute; then the chirping hell slowly comes to an end.

"Blutgebell" is another twentyseven minutes opus that we can ideally divide in two separate movements.

It begins with the sound of croaking frogs that get more and more excited as an underwater drone slowly emerges from the bottom of their small pond.

Moving from the background to the foreground, more disquieting layers of ambience and other concrète sound sources are added to the mix.

Theta waves replace all these elements as they slowly fade out. They take us through the whole second movement as their shifting tones also introduce recordings of short waves radio and the sound of running water, before coming to an end.

More Cría Cuervos solo and collaborative works are going to be released soon by other labels in Europe. Along with "Vor Feuerschlünden" they are surely going to bring him the recognition he deserves.


Reviews:

"Eugenio Maggi, also known as Cría Cuervos, may not be the best known drone meister/field recorder, but his work can easily match the better known ones... Two great tracks of drone music meeting field recordings and microsound, when not innovative, it makes surely a great listening."
Vital Weekly [more]

"Ciò che colpisce all'ascolto di "Vor Feuerschlünden" è soprattutto l'intransigenza sonora della prima traccia, che in un crescendo continuo e lineare accumula frequenze su frequenze fino ad un climax difficilmente sostenibile senza ricorrere alla pavida opportunità di girare in senso antiorario la manopola del volume... Un lavoro riuscito e maturo che soddisfa sia gli amanti del noise che quelli della drone music più cupa."
Sands-Zine [more]

"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 atmosphere is heavy as usual, but as I've said at the beginning 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."
Chain D.L.K. [more]

"...a screaming insult to beauty. A statement of raw forms and absoluteness. A polarising effort. Two tracks, the shortest already sucking up twenty minutes. After you've fought your way through, you're exhausted... Going from loud to quiet, from single notes to cacaphonous symphonics and from the rough to the refined, Maggi balances these themes without leaving the steady root mood of estrangement and alienation... The result is similar to some of the more drastic forms of experimenal film: you are scared by what you're seeing, but you can't turn away your eyes either. "Vor Feuerschlünden" keeps staring at the same spot until the image has been burnt to the retina."
Tokafi [more]

"Eugenio Maggi, a.k.a. Cría Cuervos, has gotten around quite a bit in the past few years, coordinating with artists such as Paul Bradley and Maurizio Bianchi, yet has remained under the radar. "Vor Feuerschlünden" (German for "Before Throats of Fire") consists of two long pieces over roughly 48 minutes. ...One of the best examples of "environmental" music that I've heard in a while."
Musique Machine [more]

"Maggi has done an excellent job of taking his field recordings and translating them into a unique musical experience... "Blutgebell" ever so slowly fades in with the sounds of nature filling your speakers while droning noises sounding off in the distance pick up in intensity. As the animals and insects slowly fade away, gases pour from vents in the earth creating a slow, uneasy rhythm of the earth breathing. These sounds all fade out and are replaced by a hum - similar to a ships interior – that gradually increases in volume and depth, almost as if though you are departing from the planet you have been on. The hum slowly, excruciatingly almost, becomes deeper and deeper as you continue farther and farther into darker depths: ultra low hums and hisses are minimalized and a feeling of calm surrounds you. You are eventually ushered off and all fades out to silence. At times this reminds me a lot of Sleep Research Facility with its almost organic, textured feel and deep yet calm ambience. It is very easy for the listener to become completely immersed in "Blutgebell"'s atmosphere and drift off, leaving everything else behind... As most of Afe's releases are, "Vor Feuerschlünden" is limited (to 100 copies to be specific) and comes in a beautifully designed cardboard cover. If this is at all your area of musical interest, I definitely recommend checking Crìa Cuervos out."
Heathen Harvest [more]

"Si attesta su coordinate dark ambient ed elettroacustiche il lavoro di Eugenio Maggi a.k.a. Cria Cuervos. Il suo "Vor Feuerschlünden" è composto da due lunghe suite: nella prima utilizza field recordings e drones dalla alte frequenze per costruire un muro di suono che raggiunge l'apice verso la fine. La seconda traccia esplora atmosfere più tendenti all'isolazionismo, pur non rinunciando a visionari field recordings. A tratti sembra di sentire gli Æthenor di "Deep In Ocean Sunk the Lamp of Light."
SentireAscoltare [more]

"...Comprised of just two tracks - the 21-minute title track and the 27-minute "Blutgebell" - "Vor Feuerschlünden" plays like two suited pieces of experimental electronic music as new sounds are added, layered, manipulated or deducted from the mix to transform the music as it progresses. The title track, for example, starts out very minimally, almost non-existent, but slowly and gradually forms an increasingly incessant chatter of layered noises and fuzzy drones resembling a descending plague of insects before becoming a huge wall of continuous hazy noise. "Blutgebell" also starts out very quietly with field recordings of insect sounds, birds and passing cars before the various chirps, calls and frog croaks are layered on top of each other and a low radiant drone reverberates menacingly in the background. By the eight-minute mark, the wildlife noises have subsided and the gentle undulation of layered drones and ghostly wails have taken their place. The feeling up to this point is that "Blutgebell" is the darker and more sinister of the two tracks, with a deliberately unnerving quality permeating it throughout. By the fourteen-minute mark, a constant theta wave tone oscillates almost hypnotically before increasing in density as "Vor Feuerschlünden" did before it, although not to such a massive scale, and dying out before getting too colossal. Instead, where "Vor Feuerschlünden" built more and more distorted layers, "Blutgebell" strips itself back down to the continuous hum of the theta wave, a discrete undulating drone and the gentle sound of running water slowly becoming more prominent as the track draws to a close. "Vor Feuerschlünden" is like listening to two variants of a concept; the title track builds and builds to the point of self destruction in a mass of distorted drones while "Blutgebell" is its dark ambient counterpart, building much more slowly and focussing more on disturbing imagery and tense atmosphere..."
Connexion Bizarre [more]

"Elettroacustica minimale e dall'indole immobile, rarefatta, quella che propone Eugenio Maggi, in arte Cría Cuervos, nome molto attivo nel panorama dell'avanguardia italiana - ricordiamo la collaborazione con Maurizio Bianchi. Il riverbero e il silenzio sono le guide conduttrici del suono, con intorno la natura incontaminata, insetti, rane e rumori di fauno/floristica specie. Una sorta di industrial non-artificiale, un viaggio della mente in territori inesplorati."
RockIt [more]

"Vor Feuerschlünden" by Italian sound artist Cría Cuervos, consists of two long-form pieces, one in which he seems to have taken recordings of everything that chirrups and spins and buzzes in the natural world and bound them into a tight braid, while on the other he would appear to have discovered the off button to some massive pneumatic machine that we hear slowly, slowly shut down..."
Sonomu [more]