Here’s the third and final part (INSUB REC NO NUMBER) in the series of the Alvear/Bondi duets, which appear with potter’s wheel images on the covers and which are dedicated to playing new compositions by contemporary composers in Switzerland and Chile.
First we have ‘Latidométrica’ composed by Bárbara González Barrera and played by Cyril Bondi’s percussion and the electric guitar of Cristián Alvear. This one’s a puzzling piece of isolated, small, sounds, emerging from the instruments in weird, halting ways. I find Barrera’s an interesting performance artist, who does these installations using objects and assemblages, with her own body acting as some kind of activating device for the mechanical rigs she sets up. Her strange work thus seems to involve dance, improvisation, and sculpture, and with it all she’s trying to express something about the relationships between space and time. In that context, perhaps ‘Latidométrica’ can be read as an imaginary measuring-device, one which works to her own personal table of weights and measures. If that’s half right, then perhaps the precise small guitar notes of Alvear can be taken as something akin to millimetres on a steel ruler, and the scraping actions of Bondi as a series of iron weights and counterweights attached to a system of pulleys. A new and very personal way of apprehending the dimensions of the world, perhaps, or a metaphor for such measurements.
Mara Winter composed ‘Definite Body, At Sea’, and it’s played here by Alvear’s electric guitar and the singing percussive bowls of our Swiss compadre. Mara Winter comes to us from a slightly more conventional classical background, but has become a specialist in the transverse flutes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which alone has earned her a reputation as an in-demand performer with international early-music ensembles. She also leads the Phaedrus Ensemble in Basel, and is a member / co-director of two other groups. You may have heard some of her work with Clara de Asis, as together they release material on their own Discreet Editions label, attempting to find the connections between early music and modernist composition.
For all this, I’m unable to find out much about her composerly intentions on this piece. It’s less “diagrammatic” than the very severe Barrera piece above, and indeed there could almost be a tune slowly being delineated here in these restricted sets of notes and patterns, with their lengthy pauses; but its development, if any, takes place at a near-indiscernible rate. There’s also the strong possibility that her musical score is being fed through the aspirations, techniques, and philosophies of Alvear and Bondi, both evidently drawn near to compositions of this ilk which seem to mirror their own preoccupations. If I could take a cue from the title, the music does vaguely suggest the idea of a body floating in the ocean, but it’s a very calm ocean and there’s no suggestion of a shipwreck or its aftermath as the body bobs up and down in a highly buoyant way. The ocean itself is as sluggish as any you’d find under a hot Mediterranean sky. As to it being a “definite” body, there is also an equally wispy impression of weight and volume to be had from the deliberate, considered bowl-strokes of our man Bondi.
At this point it might just be possible to forge a tentative connection with the weights and measures of the ‘Latidométrica’, but I feel this might be too much of a conceit on my part. From 7th March 2022.