Also from Dissipatio we have Suspension Pour Une Perte (diss016), by the Spanish-Portuguese composer Alfredo Costa Monteiro. This is a slow and lengthy process piece, suspended under an air of gloom and portentousness, and it fails to engage me very much, but I like the idea that he’s somehow disrupting the fabric of time itself, or to use his own words, proposing “a metaphoric abolition of the distance between past and present”. This is achieved through the simple expedient of revisiting an old recording of his from 2012, and layering it into a composition with a more recent recording of an electric organ drone. The original piano wasn’t in a great state of repair to begin with, and its foot-pedalled plonks and thwacks have a very grumbly air about them, like an ogre being woken up from a long sleep and highly reluctant to be dragged into the parlous state of the modern world.
Monteiro knows all about the conceptual and aural limitations of this challenge he has set himself, but he welcomes those limitations, and sees it as an opportunity to try even harder in his compositional work. The cover artworks, derived from 19th century photos of fossils, may be intended to take us even further back in time, not just to the 1800s but to several million years ago. (11/12/2023)