ate gena

By now I should think that our readers are a bit familiar with both of these musicians from Spain; they have an extensive set of works to their name, but this is the first time they work together.
Recorded in a single day in 2014 Monteiro uses here electro-acoustic devices and Garcia electronics, which resulted in two pieces of almost equal length. I believe that at the core of this we have some magnetic coils picking up signals from electrical sources and making these audible. This is treated as source material by them, and presented in the form of quite noise-based collages of sound. The first part might be a bit ‘softer’ than the second, but that too has its quiet moments.
It cracks, hisses and bursts with electrical energy and while I started out liking the first part of the first part, I must admit I also just seemed to like the more subdued moments of this music.
When it became loud and harsh, I thought it was a bit too easy and in that respect, perhaps, thewhole album sounded a bit easy. One has a bunch of loud, electronic sounds, and some softer andthrough some multi-track editor these sounds are stuck together. But that is, I think, too easy; there should be added value, tension for instance. Maybe I wasn’t playing this not loud enoughand should I have turned up the volume a bit more? That might be one of the problems. Or maybe this afternoon my post-flue head wasn’t into the world of noise that much? As said I enjoyed major parts of this, especially the quieter bits, which seemed to have that much needed tension.
Overall I expected more of them, I think.
Vital Weekly. Frans de Waard

Slam kings
Two strong eruptions of powerful and continuous electronic noise on Ate Gena (GERÄUSCHMANUFAKTUR NO NUMBER), by the Spanish player Miguel A. García and the Portuguese ex-pat Alfredo Costa Monteiro. We’ve heard and enjoyed a lot of heavy abstract rumble and scrape from both players over the years but this is the first time they’ve locked their digital antlers together in the noise-drone rutting grounds, to my knowledge.

Both men have proven their taste for the grim and unrelenting in their stern music. Whatever they have to say to each other can only be said over the course of two 23-minute episodes that stir into life like boiling lava or foetid eruptions of mud from a vile swamp. The listener is accordingly engulfed, and what was once liquid appears to solidify around us, leaving us with no escape and all movements severely restricted. However, it’s not an unpleasant way to spend your last dying moments, and there may yet be some positive essence contained in these grinding tones of monstrous proportions, said essence released over us like a healing balm. They did it in Bilbao in 2014, and credit a combination of electronics and electro-acoustic devices for the production of these harsh, scouring attacks. Dark, slow, sludgey and doomy; there may not be many dynamic shifts of emphasis here, nor changes in the abiding mood, but the textures are thick and delicious.

The cover collages and rehashes images by Sekien Toriyama, the 18th-century master of the Japanese woodblock print who taught Utamaro. Mythical dragons and a gigantic hairy ogre seem to be occupying the visual plane, suggesting that the noises on Ate Gena could be read as the discontented grunts and inhuman howls of these fictional monsters. From 14th March 2016.

The sound projector, Ed Pinsnet