Articles
Robert Henke
Deepchord and Soultek

Albums
Amoebazoid
Boy Is Fiction
BTB
Calika
Vic Chesnutt
Enrico Coniglio
Eric Copeland
Deadbeat
Deepchord : Echospace
Ditch
Terrence Dixon
Brian Ellis
Reinhold Friedl
The Green Kingdom
Marc Hannaford
Hrsta
K. Leimer
Lights Out Asia
Nebula 3
Netherworld
Le Peuplier de Simon
Po
Portable
Lou Reed
Jeffrey Roden
Skallander
Swod
Gregory Taylor
Telephone Jim Jesus
Pau Torres
Tunng
Rolan Vega
Robert Vincs
Warmth
Otomo Yoshihide

Compilations / Mixes
Sander Kleinenberg
One Point Two
Total 8

3"/ 7"/ 10"/ 12"/ EPs
Adultnapper
Arrow!!!
Ascoltare
Beneva vs. Clark Nova
Cinematic Orchestra
Deepchord : Echospace
Easy Changes
Fink
Peter Grummich
The Heavy
Isomer Transition
Laptik
Larytta
Nadja
Pendle Coven
Polvere
Redhooker
Spied
Andy Stott
Torrance & Hochstrate
Andy Vaz

Pau Torres: Hostile
Testing Ground

On the somewhat misleadingly-titled Hostile, Spanish artist and former Le Diablo Marichi band member Pau Torres assembles evocative, electro-acoustic soundscapes with meticulous care from field elements, digital noise, and musical fragments (piano, acoustic guitar, trumpet), some of which derive from acknowledged sources (Agustí Martínez, Josep Lluis Redondo, Un caddie renversé dans l´herve, etc.). No gaps separate the twelve pieces, resulting in a fifty-five-minute travelogue where the scenery constantly changes.

Some parts verge on the conventionally musical (the opening horn section of “Haunted Chuck” and the jazzy trumpet solo that emerges amidst rippling streams in “Booth”) while others opt for pure abstraction (the sub-lunar rumble of “Empty” and spectral nightmares of “Guantanamo Highway”). There's no shortage of abstract and de-contextualized sounds: “Climfon” builds its combustible mass from static, smears, and even a dial-up squawk, while industrial textures and bass shudders make their way into “M.” “Banjo Insult” embeds dissonant piano flourishes and dog barks within a texture-heavy mass of hum and crackle. After a muted trumpet opens the longest piece, the twelve-minute closer “Frank's,” in reflective mode, Torres adds churning noise and voices until a quiet stream of ghostly static and reverb subdues the piece into a becalmed drone state.

Torres' material is decidedly un-hostile, as he works an enormous amount of detail into his settings but never claustrophobically so. Sounds emerge unhurriedly and the resultant mass, no matter how dense, never turns overbearing. Recorded and produced in Toronto (there's even an immediately recognizable radio station snippet that surfaces in “Bob McDermont”) and Barcelona, Torres' Hostile embodies an exercise in controlled dynamics whose example others would do well to follow.

September 2007