Marcos Fernandes; Hybrid Vigor



MARCOS FERNANDESHYBRID VIGOR
Marcos Fernandes [tapes on tracks 1, 5, 7, 8; percussion on tracks 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; handclaps on track 2; sampler on track 5; shortwave on track 8] – Kristy Cheadle [percussion & handclaps on track 2] - Nathan Hubbard [percussion on tracks 2, 3, 6, 7; handclaps on track 2; electronics on track 3, 7] - Hans Fjellestad [synthesizer on track 2; piano on track 5] - Damon Holzborn [guitar & electronics on track 2] - - Michael Dessen [trombone on track 3, 7] - Scott Homan [guitar on track 3, 7] - Robert Montoya [sampler on track 3, 7; percussion on track 6] - Joscha Oetz [bass on tracks 3, 7] - Marcelo Radulovich [guitar & radio on track 3; bamboo flute on track 5] - Jason Robinson [alto saxophone on track 3, 5; bass flute on track 5] - Lisle Ellis [bass on track 4] - Philip Gelb [shakuhachi on track 4] - David Gould [percussion on track 6] - Chris Fernandes [ukulele on track 8]


Accretions ALP027. Duration: 64:24




1. Port Of Call [4:54]
2. Science Boy [7:24]
3. Undercurrents [8:48]
4. Convergence [6:36]
5. Bullets Fot Ballots [7:47]
6. Manifested / Manifesting [8:15]
7. The Orange Line [14:44]
8. Scintillation; Don't Sing Aloha When I Go [5:56]


Marcos Fernandes offers an insight into the atmospheres of this CD in his own words in the booklet:


I grew up in a Portuguese/Japanese household where relatives often gathered to eat, drink, play music and dance. I was raised a Catholic in a Buddhist land. Hybrid Vigor offers a glimpse into my ethnic and cultural identity, and the continuing creative and spiritual experiences and insights that help shape my musical process.


We’re waking up into a crowded towns'- or village area, where a lot of commotion is going on. People are talking, lively percussion and wind music is heard from some distance behind the crowd, children call out, vehicles drive past… as the music gets more somber, and a graver rhythm is sensed, for a while. It’s a soundscape composition, obviously made up of different sections of so-called reality, and inserted into each other in layers, softly merging with one another, adding big drums and hand claps, all sort of in the distance.
I’m sure there are codes to be found in here, which I can’t discern, from the cultural-musical antecedents of the composer.

The second track reminds me of some drum pieces I’ve heard from the Indian subcontinent: a soft skin drum providing a rhythmic pattern of brownish hue, nothing threatening, just rolling along – but on this steady foundation little gestures of electronic origin are dancing a squeaky trail of light, pointing charged fingers that are giving off sparks and electric discharges in a show of hattifattener energy, from the cosmos through the cosmos to the cosmos… and in these signals spanning the area from music to noise to music into musical noise and noisy music some bowing and bending of the audio specks render them morphological, lingual appearances, swirling about in your language detection center as little whirlwinds of the residue of forlorn sentences…



Abilene, Texas in August 1978
(Photo: Ingvar Loco Nordin)

We’re passing without a break into track 3 which combines some real (or unreal?) human lingual garlands out of political or meteorological remnants off of the local FM stations in a sound-poetic and textsound compositional way with the emerging jazzy gestures out of the ensemble – and the creative flux of electronic treatment is omnipresent throughout, but applied with a gentle touch of artistry, never overdoing its boundless craft of change and manipulation, but utilized in a precise, withheld manner which heightens the enjoyment of listening immensely. Tickling spurs of electronics in a pre-echo, cut-up spray inside the left ear allows for the saxophone gold mid-head, as a speeding line of visions move down a lit tunnel at right, until a steady electric bass takes charge and adds thorough force and direction, straight ahead! This pied piper gathers the townsfolk for an attack on boredom downtown, no doubt!

Track 4 opens in a meditation of the East, mist and shrouded mountaintops and all… and the shakuhachi, bass and percussion paint an introspective picture of sounds, masterly, slowly, carefully…
Sparse metallic percussive attacks are given the time to ring out fully into silence, or into the general web of sounds, as the atmosphere very gradually is densified, diversified, though never leaving the Japanese mist of nose tip hypnosis and the dew of grass on your feet; hot tea somewhere in a bamboo environment…

Track 5 commences in a rattlesnake rattle of percussion, envisioning Western U.S. stretches of land; North American Indian country – but perhaps the intention was a South or Middle American one, which the language might indicate, but I’ll just let my vision roll along… in its Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California atmosphere of Indian medicine man mystique and hot Latin jazz expressions of good medicine, mescaline and sweat cures in tepees… as the voices swirl about my sense of being in a dream of uninterpreted humanity, reminding me of some Robert Ashley compositions, like
Yellow Man With Heart With Wings, circling itself in the magnificence of existence…

A cough begins track 6, which then spreads out a tapestry of diverse, careful percussion of wooden origin before you – at first – in a John Cage manner of lighthearted humor and generosity of spirit. This is music for the insects moving about under the dried up leaves – until more dense and forceful incidents appear, like pebbles and boulders on an old king’s grave; a mound of percussion inside the composition… and the metal parts of the ensemble join, immediately opening up a much wider scope of geography and geology to the listener – and percussion has a lot in common with geology, spiritually, atmospherically…
This piece is a geologist’s trek through a highly interesting area of rocks and pebbles: a lithophonic dreamscape!


Abilene, Texas in August 1978
(Photo: Ingvar Loco Nordin)

Track 7 is the longest on the CD with its almost 15 minutes. It is called The Orange Line, and the sense of a line protruding into – or from! – space, is evident right from the outset, and I come to think about violin wizard Malcolm Goldstein and his Sounding The Fragility of Line, or, for that matter, percussion guru Matthias Kaul and his glassy motions through hurdy-gurdy soundscapes…
A lot happens in
The Orange Line, whereas the meditative feeling of line and lineage remains, around which all these other sounds – scrapings, twangings, eruptions of the wind, smalltalk of the trombone – spiral along down the track, anchored and secured – in all their whim! – by this sometimes just hypothetical line inside the music.
At times the piece takes on the guise of classical jazz music, like the incident with the bass solo, just like out of a record with John Coltrane’s crew back in the 1960s!
This, however, moves into a 1970s’ funky mood, and then you really don’t quite know where you arrive… but that is nice!
Evidently this gang knows how to drift in and out of styles and phases, seemingly effortlessly.

The finishing 8th track oozes with atmospherical smells and fragrances, like where you stashed away in a corner of a Texan Greyhound depot, listening to the wheezing of fumes and smelling the hot dogs or French Fries, or… Tacos!
It also appears to me that the wheezing could just as well come from the waves of the ocean, and I hear song birds in the tight sonic web, plus many voices off of the short wave, even sporting glimpses of Oriental music from behind the static of the world…


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