Now this is a CD with withheld information. This is what Radulovich believes we should know about his music:

“(case of the missing) THUMB symbol… signifies, stands out sore and happy. walkabout in a day. such a holiday. treats summer… no burden beast sing. water. fall. flows…”
He also inserts that the recordings were made in San Diego, La Butadona (Mexico), Big Sur, Hong Kong, Santiago (Chile) and San Francisco.
(However, there is more info on this multi-media artist of Chilean descent on his homepage, to which I direct interested parties. The link is provided above)

To make things worse, the grammatical malfunctions (intended or not) above, are presented in a layout that makes the text almost unreadable… Frankly, the cover is extremely ugly and non-functional… if the intent wasn’t to make me angry and tired of the whole thing… However, even though this probably is the most irritating piece of CD cover I’ve ever seen, I’ll have a listen to the contents…

You’re thrown right into a soundscape of hushed qualities; just the rustle of wind through leafy crowns, footsteps, distant children’s voices, birds chirping and then talk show radio, perhaps in Chinese – so I suppose Radulovich has mixed the recorded locations – or maybe the order of the unnamed tracks on the CD is not analog to the order of recording locations mentioned above.
The rustling of the wind stays on, but is filled out with unidentified, soft-spoken hypnotic trance music of minimalistic qualities. Seabirds scar the air with their shrill voices, and the wind through the trees comes and goes in waves of varying density.

Track 2 follows number 1 without a break, in a really ugly cut, but it must be intended, because you don’t do that kind of thing otherwise.
You still experience children’s voices and wind, and a timbre-rich organ tone fills up your space, panning slightly, as the wind is getting louder too, carrying the chirping of back-yard birds. Perhaps the grunts of pigs in a pigsty are detected too. Like on track 1 a soft, meandering, fleeting music of synthesizers (?) rise through the environmental sounds after a while, and I begin to take a liking to this kind of thinned-out, yet in a way dense, environmental-instrumental composition. It seems to be achieved with a sense of poetry and sensitivity of touch, a sensitivity of perception and a soft application of the tonal paintbrush. I’m glad the cover didn’t scare me off completely… (But I’m not saying Radulovich shouldn’t change that horribly boring cover!)
Even though not much is happening in this repetitious wind-voice-bird-synthesizer walk-by, I nonetheless get a distinct feeling of movement, directional movement, quite speedy, through a thin layer of existence, simply headed for an ever-receding horizon of Man. Perhaps Marcelo Radulovich is taking the un-uttered, the un-said, the withheld to new depths through these compositions which simply hint at something that seems to be perceived peripherally, through the corner of the eye, from behind the fence, in the other apartment, a second or so out of synch…

Not seamlessly, but immediately, track 3 follows track 2. A church bell tolling at midday introduces fleeting, watery, brook-like proceedings with added restaurant kitchen clatter or perhaps pebbles slipping down glacial slopes. A sense of watery caves transforms into a city street bustle with voices of people floating about like hovering and suddenly speeding dragonflies. The voices swirl around you like were you a garbage can or a newspaper stand right there on the curb. It’s a strange feeling of closeness and remoteness simultaneously, and this definitely is a quality of composition not often demonstrated.
Trucks gearing up appear like soft drones of varying intensities, and Radulovich takes hold of the whole ambience of the city, throwing it around in shadings and lightings of poetic bliss… at times producing whining, fleeting images reminding me of some sections from works by Jean-Claude Risset, while this method of spraying remnants of passing conversations in a thin film across the soundscape is reminiscent of Luc Ferrari and his “Presque rien”-pieces. Water and wind and human voices are the three constituting elements of these pieces, providing a basic atmosphere of spirit as well as matter. Recognizable, simple melodies emerge at times, and it makes me wonder whether I’m not hearing the sounds of a merry-go-round in America, with the horses going up and down and all around, like in Joni Mitchell’s beautiful and forcefully sad “Circle Game” or Judy Spangenthal-Nordin’s field recording of a creaking merry-go-round in Central Park, N.Y.C., playing “Georgie Girl” in July of 1989.
These events in Marcelo Radulovich’s piece could also – why not? – be fragments of music carried on the wind from Wollman rink, as the skaters swirl about in colorful clothes and waving scarves like in some Medieval Central European oil painting…

Track 4 continues the main, underlying timbres, but more brute assignments into murmurs and the infra-domain occurs, not – as it seems – disturbing all these voices falling around you like drizzle. Enchanted synthesizer colors rise like soap bubbles, their spheres reflecting the light and the cityscape, the buildings appearing in the many colored fleeting surfaces of the bubbles in concave shapes… and all the constituents of the environment are ground down in Radulovich’s synthesized mix, rotating, spiraling, shooting off like lava bursts out of crevasses in the crust… and falling back into the mix to be fragmented and rearranged once again, down to the molecule, yes, to the atom, yes, even to the elementary particles of the web of sounds – and the birds are still chirping, evoking some kind of hope for a future, some kind of continuation, even if not in this particular body, this particular life… but still…

Towards the end of track 5 more sparse constructions of sound are being erected, with strands of tones connected to sphere-shaped joints, and a notion of geometric patterns emerge through the haze of the collected activity. There is a pulsation present throughout Radulovich’s CD, even though you may not always be able to put your finger on it and define it.

Track 6 opens on a bike-spoke note, panning the scenery, and deep murmurs out of the secret infra-worlds of below rise like protruding bubbles in the cracking asphalt of downtown areas, while the voices are kept like just another source of sound, and while water is trickling down a brook at your left ear…

I’m glad I didn’t let the lousy cover prevent me from listening to Marcelo Radulovich’s CD. It is a very unusual and original venture into sound and environment, worthy of many re-spins.