Marcos Fernandes, Hans Fjellestad, Haco, Jakob Riis - "Haco Hans Jakob Marcos"
Two California residents plus one Danish and one Japanese musician recorded
at a session in Tijuana, mexico in 2003. Marcos fernandes plays drums and
percussion, Hans Fjellestad synthesizer, Jakob Riis Powerbook, Haco
electronics, toys and voice. The outcome is a set of five agitated yet
tightly bound improvisations that disclose real affinity among these
disparate players. The capacity of Fernandes to mix his kit convincingly
with electronic instruments while heightening the music's momentum, most
notably on "Glow", is a key element in its success. Not that any group
involving Fjellestad is likely to becom becalmed, driven as he is by wild
enthusiasm for the analog synth's lurking squeals, chimes and burbles. Haco
and Riis add viscosity and texturing, and it all hangs together in motion.
- Julian Cowley, The Wire
In a time very far from now, four musicians will meet in a studio in
Tijuana, Mexico and start playing. The first will be Marcos Fernandes, owner
of the accretions label (which will, three years after the session, release
the album) and one of San Diego's most avid future jazz performers. The
second will be Hans Fjellestad, famed director and a laptop artist on a
neverending tour. Japanese
"Vocalist/lyricist-composer/multi-instrumentalist/sound-artist" Haco will be
third in line, a multi-talent who will sport a homepage in plain text
format, containing enlightning articles on issues such as "Happy Proof of
Intelligent Life beyond the Pop Mainstream". And then there will be Jakob
Riis, hailing from the "rotten state of Denmark" and performing in more
ensembles than we could possibly name here. Together, they will embark on a
sonic journey beyond compare.
In a time very far from now, four musicians will record five pieces of
almost exactly equal length and then arrange them in ascending order. The
first will sound like a dialogue between various percussive instruments and
a broken sequencer in close proximity of a humming generator. The second
will commence more energetically, with wild drum rolls and squeaking noises,
before entering a canyon of delay and echo, full of twinkling bells and
morse-coded vibraphon messages. On the third one, a recently hatched bird
will sing a ten minute long song from the remeains of his egg shell. Scenes
from a future Science Fiction movie, shot in complete black and stuffed with
sensory supplements, will dominate the fourth track. The fifth piece will be
a love song, as romantically bouncing notes dance a strange waltz to a
passionately detuned miniature saxophone. The sounds deriving from the
Synths and laptops will alternately resemble a burning, a frizzling, a
bubbling, a rubbing, a smacking and a scouring. Haco's toys and voice will
add a naive charme, as if the music were being played by a group of dolls
inside a Fisher Price village. And Marcos' Fernandes' Drums and Percussions
will asign a clear status to each of the elements, engaging in atmospheric
sleepwalking, rhythmic patterns or a build up of tension. The players will
have all the freedom in the world, yet each of their works will have a
recognisable structure and a character of its own, as if everything had been
minutely planned in advance. The album will be fifty minutes long, it will
not contain a single melody in the usual sense of the word or a chord
progression in the Western mindset and it will not be boring for one second.
The music will sound like nothing you have heard before. Maybe you will, at
first, believe this to be a random collection of sounds. If you have
listened to some of the other accretions releases, you will recognise the
Jazz aspect of things, the effort to capture something unspeakable (or not
even yet existent) in sound. You may actually find it breathtakingly
exciting and awe-inspiring, without really being able to say why. But in a
time very far from now, your children's children's children's children will
play this record in whatever format the future will come up with and think
to themselves: "This is the coolest thing we've ever heard!"
- Tobias Fischer,Tokafi
This music was improvised in a studio of Tijuana, Mexico in 2003. Four
musicians/sound artists with pretty dissimilar backgrounds were reunited in
an improbable place to set up a series of exchanges whose main result is a
curious intersection of affected balances and discarded identities. At the
beginning, Fernandes' drums seem to prevail in the mix; but soon enough,
synthetic eruptions and stuttered affirmations by Fjellestad and Riis begin
to mould an ambiguous bed of thorns for Haco's electronics, toys and (in
"Speak") quiet introverted utterances. Instantly, the whole gets
instinctively connected to a bizarre underworld of biotic agglomerates with
a collective lunatic personality, in which percussive fragments and an
inexhaustible simultaneousness of electronic idiosyncrasies join, acquiring
a soft polymorphic consciousness. An utterly impalpable sense of
extraterrestrial counterpoint does the rest, giving our perceptive channels
the right amount of time to get used to this strange concoction.
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Marcos Fernandes plays percussion and his compatriots (Hans Fjellestad,
Haco, Jakob Riis) fill in the electronic details. The results can be as
peppy as an old-fashioned coffee percolator and as adventurous as the Mars
Rover. The sort of whacked-out expedition I've been looking for for some
time.
- Jon Worley, Aiding & Abetting
Computers might not need an audible language to talk to one another, but I
imagine that if they did, it would sound an awful lot like this. The disc's
track titles follow a recognizable path-awake, crawl, speak, glow, last-but
listeners looking for concrete aural markers to guide them through might
feel a bit lost in the code. Still, the language analogy could be an apt
one. Half the quartet speaks Japanese and the other half Danish, and they
were all having this particular conversation in Tijuana (just south of the
border from Hans and Marcos's adopted home of southern California). The core
syllables at work here are built out of percussion, synthesizer,
electronics, toys, voice, and PowerBook. The participants are polite in
their interactions, careful not to trample over one another or cut anybody
off mid-thought. And like sitting at a street café in Paris without a word
of French in your vocabulary, you can absorb the arc of the conversation
without any hint as to what anyone is talking about.
- Molly Sheridan, NewMusicBox
Although perhaps the improvisations captured on this disc may be more Dolf
Mulder's thing, I must admit I quite enjoyed it and that's partly because
aside with all the chaotic drumming of Marcos Fernandes, the thing is
largely electronic. Hans Fjellestad plays synthesizer, Haco (best known for
he work with After Dinner) plays toys, electronics and voice and Jakob Riis
plays powerbook. All four musicians operate in the fields of improvised
music. This disc was recorded already three years ago, in one day, in a
studio. Later on Fjellestad and Fernandes did the mixing, bringing out what
they had in mind: mixing electronics and acoustic instruments. I must say
they succeeded well in their task. Of course there are the usual elements of
chaos that linger around these kind of musics in some of these pieces, but
this quartet are at their best when they play a more contemplative tune.
When looked as such, this CD works towards its way through various
approaches, but in the final track (aptly called 'Last'), everything seems
to be coming together: in this the longest piece there are elements of
minimalism, of melancholy, but also small outbursts of chaos and mayhem.
It's here when they are at their best. Each player has a distinct sound, his
or her own voice, and none of the voices prevail, but there is instead
plenty of room for communication. A very good meeting of electricity and
analogue vibrations.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
The thing about improvising is the process happens only once. After the
moment is done, it's gone and gone for good. Unless, that is, you happen to
have a method of taping a particular event for posterity. We're lucky this
quartet session was taped indeed. Percussionist Marcos Fernandes, synth
player Hans Fjellestad, vocalist and electronics whiz Haco and laptopper [in
his case, Powerbook man] Jakob Riis came together one day in Tijuana, Mexico
to record their musical thoughts and beliefs. It's as if the world around
them stood still while they gelled their ideas into one seamingless whole.
Striking thing is their communication style - the way they link disjoined
ideas to one another. It must've been difficult to hold this energy at bay
as the ideas come quick and heavy. Neither jazz, electronic music nor pure
improvisation, the sounds at hand are just there. Take them for what they
are without questioning their right to be. In between the laptop
manipulations, synth glitches, various toys and real-time percussion [as
opposed to a machine taking the place of a human], we hear a sense of
formation of a real working quartet. As much as I hate the word, I found
the listening experience to be rather [dare I say it] pleasant. In places,
it does resemble space music - especially when the high-pitched glitches
start to resemble racing comets. More than just the sum of its parts, these
four live and breathe the sounds they make. This is more than just a studio
session of amateurs. These guys are authentic with a capital A. Not one
minute is spent on meandering, worthless doodling. Nowhere do I hear a band
that is lost or searching for rhyme and reason to their music. These four
have already found the highly coveted IT.
- Tom Sekowski, Gazeta
Here's a skittery, (seemingly) random little batch of tracks. Springboarding
in this collaborative effort from a minimalist experimental aesthetic the
four artists (hence the "band" name) involved in this project have created a
sound that is tenebrous yet possessing of a certain personality. It feels
almost as if one has stepped into shadows unfamiliar and is surrounded by
diminuitive creatures uttering from just out of sight, curious but afraid of
you. Mind you, I'm not saying the sounds herein actually SOUND like that but
that that is the personality conveyed. Glitch, techy sounds, vocal
manipulations, etc., are the core of these soundscapes, which also use
silent spaces between burbs, blips and scrapes as legitimate parcels of
sound, as much as the actual positive sounds. Like the audio version of a
painter's negative space. Truly, while this music isn't aggressive it is
capable of being enveloping. Ultimately, though, it is an interesting but
not entirely engaging (despite its ability to surround) and sometimes a tad
annoying. In the right mood, this could be a useful soundtrack for a lazy
moment. But indisputable artistic creativity aside, this just isn't my cup
of tea.
- Kristofer Upjohn, Raves.com
Deste já estava à espera há algum tempo. Através das movimentações à volta
do Trummerflora Collective, a que pertence o percussionista Marcos
Fernandes, foi-me possível antecipar o encontro, mesmo tendo em conta que
tal poderia nunca passar de um hipotético desejo, considerando a distância
física que medeia entre os membros deste colectivo de improvisadores. Que
agrupa, além do percussionista nipo-americano, repartido entre Yokohama e
San Diego, o também californiano Hans Fjellestad, do duo Donkey, em
sintetizadores, o japonês Haco, em voz e electrónica, e o dinamarquês Jakob
Riis, em laptop. Em 'Haco Hans Jakob Marcos', gravado em Tijuana, México, a
receita é combinar eficazmente sons electrónicos e orgânicos de modo
inventivo, estabelecer pontes entre dois mundos, realidades culturais que
tanto têm de próximo como de distante, assimilar a reverberação de sons
antigos que ecoam juntamente com o último grito da fonte digital. A arte
está no saber dosear os ingredientes, improvisações vocais e instrumentais;
saber usar o tempo e o espaço como base de trabalho e com eles confeccionar
um produto musical capaz de comunicar uma extraordinária vitalidade. Num
mercado em que proliferam edições de música electroacústica improvisada,
esta edição é um caso bem sucedido de intercâmbio estético sem
constrangimentos de ordem formal, eivado de um certo pragmatismo sonoro e
assinalável empenhamento artístico. Tudo concorre para estimular a
imaginação do ouvinte. Excelente entretenimento, este 'Haco Hans Jakob
Marcos', a mais recente edição da norte-americana Accretions.
- Eduardo Chagas, Jazz e Arradores
Das illustre Quartett hat diese Aufnahmen bereits im Mai 2003 gemacht, in
Tijuana, Mexiko. Marco Fernandes spielt Schlagzeug und Perkussion, Hans
Fjellestad Synthesizer, Haco ist an Electronics und Spielzeug aktiv und
bringt Töne mit ihrer Stimme ein, Jakob Riis bedient den Laptop.
Die 4 Musiker beackern das weite Feld der improvisativen freien Musik. Es
gibt keine stilistischen Vorgaben, keine Grenzen, es sei denn, die der
eigenen Inspiration. Kein Ton der 5 ausgedehnten Tracks der CD ist
'gewöhnlich', kein Instrument gibt 'herkömmliche' Töne wieder. Die
Spielweise, die Intimität der Einspielung, die Intensität der Sounds und der
Musiksprache - nichts ist 'normal'. Die vier Avantgardisten haben ihre
eigene Art, Instrumente zu bedienen, Töne und Stimmungen zu finden,
forcieren und verebben zu lassen, um neuem, aus soeben empfundenen und
gespielten Improvisationen entstandenem Klang Ausdruck zu verleihen. Äußerst
interessant ist dabei nicht nur der letzliche Mix der Aufnahmen und das
Arrangement der Instrumente, sondern auch, welches Instrument gerade im
Vordergrund arbeitet, während andere im Off hantieren oder unterstreichende
Sounds einbringen. Dabei ist kein Musiker stets mehr im Vordergrund; wie die
Stimmungen und schwellenden Sounds wechseln, so arbeiten sich auch
verschiedene Instrumente mit ihrem typischen Ausdruck vor. Hin und wieder
kann es passieren, dass das Quartett gemeinsam an der (a)tonalen Front steht
und ein komplexes Gewirr hektischer Töne erzeugt. Das sind die emotionalen
Höhepunkte, die als Krönung des introvertierten Spiels erreicht werden, wenn
die Spannung der intensiven Soundtracks in freien Höhen explodiert. Alle 4
Musiker zeigen ein großes Gespür für vitale, intime und eindrückliche
Klänge, zudem gehen sie sensibel aufeinander ein und loten Klangweiten aus,
die in der Form noch nicht zu hören waren. Und doch gibt es gewisse
Parallelen.
In den Tracks "crawl", "speak" und "glow" erinnert das Quartett an die
ersten drei LP-Seiten von "Ummagumma", dem exzellenten
Psychedelic-Avantgarde-Werk Pink Floyds. Da sind gar einige konkrete
Parallelen auszumachen, wenn "Ummagumma" an sich auch deutlich
konventioneller ist. Die Stimmung und das Flair sind verwandt wie einige
technische Licks.
Die 5 Tracks sind jedoch allen populären Stilen gleich fern. Weder wird hier
Jazz oder Rock gespielt, noch Elektronik. Zwar leben die Töne aus diesem
Pool, sind in ihrer Menge aber etwas ganz Neues, eben freie improvisative
Musik.
Am faszinierendsten in allen Stücken ist die 'Leere', aus der sich die
Instrumente Töne ziehen. Es scheint, als rausche der Hintergrund. In der
weiteren Entwicklung entpuppt sich das als Klang des Laptops, der dem Fehlen
jegliches Tones in den Millisekunden zwischen den Tönen das Rauschen
entgegensetzt und die Stille greifbar macht.
Sich dem Werk zu nähern, braucht man keine großen Hürden zu nehmen. Laut und
dramatisch wird das Quartett selten, zumeist wird ein sphärisch-stilles
Flair entworfen, das eine ganz eigene Harmonik hat, die ansprechend und auf
ihre Art unterhaltsam ist. Wie bei allen Werken von Accretions gilt: nur wer
wagt gewinnt. Aber das gilt, wie jeder weiß, hier wie überall.
- Volkmar Mantei, Ragazzi
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