Ottawa’s Mauricio Velasco honorably confesses that he started composing just seven years ago. As he is putting the finishing touches on a full album (under pseudonym), an EP signed with his own name is offered as a taster. The operating environment is that of impure droning with vague post-industrial tendencies. To engender these four tracks, Velasco used “recorded samples, analog/digital instruments, along with a plethora of digital layering techniques”. Luckily, a discernible awareness kept him sufficiently distant from the routines typically plaguing this sonic area.
Introduced by acoustic ghosts of uncertain origin, both percussive and noisy, “Carry On” delivers an evocative drone somehow reminiscent of the remote echo of a weather reconnaissance aircraft, as well as the music of the unforgotten Jeff Greinke (circa Timbral Planes). After a less significant interlude that, if you ask me, could have been left out (“A Play On Light”), the almost six minutes of “Donde Se Acaba” take us back into the fog of a barren landscape where, once again, sounds apparently deriving from processed percussion reverberate. Then a mute lament comes forth, the subsonics unit taking command of the psychological operations while, beneath the surface, invisible mouths try to remove their gags. In the concluding moments, equally muffled fragments of pianistic melody call to mind certain studies by Asher Tuil, a major player in this game.
The longest piece”The Absolute” blends the entire range of gray undertones and unclear sonorities informing Velasco’s work on this occasion. Unquiet staticity, subterranean oscillation, intuition of something happening or about to happen. We are given enough time to reflect on wrong decisions that ruined our life, or to realize how much energy we wasted on unintelligent people. At one point the context varies slightly via a hint of bass vamp, but the crescendo of distorted frequencies that follows and ends the whole vacuums any residual oxygen.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 