nadir

In all my years of reviewing music by Alfredo Costa Monteiro, solo and otherwise, I don’t think I heard the Astero before. Maybe it’s new, maybe they never released anything. Astero is a duo of Monteiro on electro-acoustic devices and Juan Matos Capote on home made oscillators. The two lengthy pieces were already recorded in January 2011 and show a love for the more extreme nature of music. It’s radical music that works on a wide spectrum of frequencies. Lots of high end frequencies, lots of crackles, but also deep, low end sounds. It’s all played with great care but I assume also in an improvised manner. There is enough evidence to support that. Maybe a bit more editing would have been in place here, to weed out some repeating elements and perhaps cut them into shorter pieces, as now it moves all along the spectrum within each piece; unless of course that’s the idea behind these pieces. The sound sources are not very much alike those normally used in the world of improvised music, which makes this quite a rare thing. It’s very minimal in approach, but when tracks have changed, they sure can land in a totally new area. As said this is some radical music, going from extreme loudness to extreme deepness and is a fine aural treatment, if you are up to it of course. Not for the weak of heart.

Frans de Waard, Vital weekly