Fakear - All Glows - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Fakear - Animal [COMPACT DISCS] Digipack Packaging date 06/24/2016

Portuguese composer Afonso Ferreira a.k.a. Farwarmth is a keen collaborator, as part of the duos HRNS, PURGA and the collective 00 NEKYIA. His debut album for Planet Mu is perhaps his most ambitious collaborative work yet. Built up over four years, it's sources are recordings of friends and family in improvised sessions with cello, flute and accordion with Afonso on keyboards from the time he was on an artists residency in 2018.Afonso's music is made by carefully processing and rendering his source material and he talks about the compositions in terms of emotional resonance, the construction of Inchconnections between time, people and soundInch and the sessions which make up this album being about Inchemotional exchange, that gave away to something I did not imagine I could've reached alone.Inch He describes the album as Inchrooted in the earth, but aiming for the heavens in an endless search to breathe enough air.Inch The music here can seem alien; recognisable sounds turned unrecognisable, channeling raw emotion by building layers of sound in unusual ways into huge, energetic sculptures.The album opens with shard-like chords and twinkling melodies as if the sound is being coaxed into life. The track titles also suggest an almost uncanny onset starting with 'Shadows In The Air', moving on to the open blasts of chords in 'Below The White Sky', and the strange intermittent static of  'Across The Black Sand'. These titles all refer to Afonso's experience of being alone on the beach where he lives, making sense of the endless winters. It's not until 'Into The Grey Sea' that the bare instruments reveal themselves, freely weaving over each other in a strange dark tapestry, shot through with shimmering sounds that seem to come from distant shores. 'To Heft The Weight Of Memory' lands somewhere between the mystical sadness of Arvo Pärt and the fragmented beauty of Fennesz.

For many decades, students of Domenico Scarlatti, including me, have been debating about the relationship between most of Scarlatti's Sonatas and Flamenco dance. Silvia Rambaldi and Andreina Di Girolamo deserve our praise for presenting a practical demonstration that moves beyond the boundary of words, uniting dance and harpsichord performance, by means of the collaboration of the dancer Rita Marchesini, who is an expert on both Baroque and Flamenco dance. And since very often within certain Sonatas there is an alternation between the Andalusian style and the Italian one, the dancer, with her performance, demonstrates that it is possible to InchplayInch with both styles appropriately. (Emilia Fadini) This interesting production on the harpsichord sonatas InchencryptedInch by Domenico Scarlatti is accompanied by a DVD rom containing the video of the sonatas for two harpsichords filmed in the performance InchLa festa dorata dell'animaInch, in which Rita Marchesini (historical dance and flamenco) and Alberto Rodriguez (Andalusian guitarist) join the harpsichordists Andreina di Girolamo and Silvia Rambaldi in this Inchfield demonstrationInch of the influence of Italian and Spanish dance on the works of the great composer. The comments in the interview with the late Emilia Fadini are not to be missed.