Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Transient Spaces as Impermanent Lines
POLAND SUBLIME RETREAT SR019 CD (2024)
Our favourite Portugal composer returns to this label after a few years – he made the very first release Invisible Light for Taras Opanasiuk in 2020. It was an imaginative and intense piece of electro-acoustic investigations, an album version of a much larger sensory-deprivation experimentation playing hob with the senses of the audience. It so happens he did it in a cinema.
Today’s album isn’t directly cinematic in its intentions, but there are rolls of celluloid and visible sprocket holes on the front cover and inner sleeve; plus there are sideways references to narrative forms, and the creator claims he was “inspired by the found footage technique in experimental cinema”. What this means is we get 49:04 mins of doctored field recordings and found tapes, but they have been very carefully “compiled” in pursuit of this strange drifting effect that Monteiro seeks. He would like us to wander around these multiple sonic atmospheres, without any clear idea of what we’re hearing; even he himself contrived to forget the original sources that he was working with, the better to drain them of any associations or foregone conclusions. Inevitably, I suppose, he’s also clutching at the “psychogeographical” angle, perhaps hoping to emulate the much-cited dérive that was attempted by Parisian intellectuals who followed the precepts of Guy Debord from the late 1950s. But Debord and his crew were aiming to undermine normality in quite a radical, transformative way, challenging the fixed nature of city streets and civic buildings in order to arrive at their own interpretations and meanings, with a very determined political intent which Alfredo Costa Monteiro might not share.
That matters not, as he succeeds brilliantly on his own artistic terms. Not a familiar sound enters the arena; all cliches and pitfalls of the field recording genre are studiously avoided; and there’s no attempt to shock the listener with silly juxtapositions or jolting edits. Instead, what emerges are new possibilities for how we might perceive the world around us; keeping things vague and directionless has proven, on this occasion, to be a very successful means of achieving this. Excellent. (30/04/2024)