[reviews] afe092lcd
cría cuervos: vor feuerschlünden

Eugenio Maggi, also known as Cria Cuervos, may not be the best known drone meister/field recorder, but his work can easily match the better known ones.

He has had a couple of releases already over the past few years on labels such as Mystery Sea, Taalem and Thisco as well as a collaborative works with Paul Bradley, Maurizio Bianchi and Sparkle in Grey, here he has a new solo work.

The title apparently means something like "Before throats of fire" in German, which I didn't know, and it has two long pieces.

It seems to me that field recordings play an all important part, but they are not easy to detect, except perhaps for the frog choir in the opening minutes of "Blutgebell". Apparently there is also somewhere the sound of cicadas, gas, frogs and water, but with Maggi everything is thrown in the mighty blender called the computer.

In "Blutgebell" the frogs leap over into slow cascading wave like sounds - perhaps the processed sound of water - and could easily pass for a somewhat simplified version of The Hafler Trio, mixing their previous interest in surround sound and the recent drone material. When the drones fade out slowly, and water runs in, it's almost like a cover of "Brain Song".

The title piece, which opens the CD, is a similar piece, even when field recordings are harder to recognize. It might be statically charged electricity or escaping gas, which at first moves on the higher end of the sound spectrum, but later on it arrives on various other levels, and things grow towards each other. From that point onwards things grow like a howling beast until it reaches it peak and in a rather quick fashion it vanishes as mysterious as it appears.

Two great tracks of drone music meeting field recordings and microsound, when not innovative, it makes surely a great listening.

[Frans de Waard on Vital Weekly 581]