Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais have collaborated as @C since 2000, producing over a dozen albums for almost as many labels and frequent collaborators with like-minded sound artists. They’re also proprietors of the outstanding Cronica label, responsible for some of the finest electronica of recent years. The title of their latest release Music for Empty Spaces calls to mind Eno’s Music for Airports, but there’s nothing ambient or incidental about @C’s work. If they’re indebted to anyone it’s early musique concret collagists, perfected by producers of the Metamkine label and in the abstract field recording-compositions of Francisco Lopez; @c somehow capture the dramatic leaps of the former with the sleek design of the latter.
The ‘empty space’ of the title to refers to the artificial space(s) conjured by the recording process, specifically, the reverberant chasms of dub. “Our music is about concrete and musical sounds and their plastic nature when they are digitally (captured and) transformed… It is about the number of ways in which a sound can be heard and how it conflicts or dialogues with other sounds.” Tudela and Carvalhais revel in transforming the teeniest of tones into towering monoliths, and vice versa, and back again, magnifying timbral differences through the juxtaposition and overlapping of incongruous sources. The result of these procedures, the finished tracks, are considerably richer than the sum of their parts: wind flurries, sine tones, birdsong, scurrying grit, digital funk, silence – all combine into beautifully mysterious, endlessly shifting sonic vistas.
Tracks vary from the minute-long instrumental of ‘76.5’, whose crackly pools of piano fragments wither and collapse under the weight of effects, to the symphonic 16 minute ’76.3′, which moves from shrill insect chatter through indistinct jungle din, concluding with elements of jazz improvisation – sax splutters and percussive rattle. Countless other elements crop up, both here and throughout, all tied together by a clear sense of compositional unity, regardless of their disparate natures. The most recurrent feature of Music for Empty Spaces, aside from reverb, is the dancing flicker of tiny glitches, like sand jostled on a microphone, binding the collection like cement.
Joshua Meggitt
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