From Bilbao we have 20.20 (REPETIDOR R137) from Enrike Hurtado, appearing here as e.hurtado. Hurtado sure has made some unusual records, including that oddity that paid tribute to the radical Basque poet Joxan Artze, and more recently Hardcore Punk Dissasters that was a curious mixing-desk collage attempting to say something about the spirit of American punk bands of the 1980s.
Somehow Hurtado’s work never quite falls into place for me, although he’s obviously very intelligent and quite prolific, sometimes appearing as Bazterrak and Azunak, working with Mattin and Miguel A García, and participating in an experimental software programme in the early 2000s, designing his own computer apps for making sound. Today’s item is not entirely unrelated to that, but he did it using SuperCollider rather than a program he wrote himself. Put simply, it’s a “digital feedback system”, which appears to mean that he feeds a variety of source materials into the jaws of his Apple Mac, whereupon the program kicks in and performs its transformative and generative tasks. He likes the way that his “system” will rearrange a pop song and blindly repeat parts of the structure in unpredictable ways (although no evidence of such experiments on this release); he also favours distortion, instability, and combining digital glitch artefacts with pure noise.
Did I mention he did it during the 2020 lockdown? Yes, it’s yet another lockdown album, this one explicitly trying to express something about “feelings of confinement” in sound. Well, he might have succeeded on that account; as with many other similar projects that begin and end inside the computer (the dry, bloodless experiments of Gintas K come to mind, or Marc Spruitt), the music on 20.20 conveys to me the odd impression of being untouched by human hands, floating inside its own hermetic universe, and bearing no relation whatsoever to the outside world, or even to anything recognisable about human existence. And the empty, abstract drones here might recall to mind those endless days and nights when we all drew a strange comfort from being confined to the house, for what seemed like a time of no reprieve. But nothing here lives up the powerful transformation or re-structuring effects that he seems to be promising; it’s mostly rather ordinary electronic music, unsurprising sounds, and compositionally very unsatisfying. Is this the result of trusting the software too much to think for itself, or simply that audio programs and software tools are nowhere near as inventive as we’d like to believe? Or is it that digital feedback is materially deficient and unsuitable for making interesting music? From 17th November 2023.