J.L. Maire & Alfredo Costa MonteiroL'Écoute Tactile
Crónica 237
Release: 3 June 2025
- L’Écoute Tactile
Crónica 237
Release: 3 June 2025
J.L. Maire and Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s ongoing collaboration travels through sonic territories where two different but complementary approaches to sound and music production converge: the extended pure intonation and the exploration of timbre without fixed tones.
The recording in L'Écoute Tactile emerged from an improvisation session in September 2024 in Costa Monteiro’s studio. In this session, Maire used an extended scale of a bagpipe that the composer, “traditional botanist”, and music theorist Erv Wilson described in his works. Costa Monteiro contraposed electroacoustic devices that included springs, homemade motors, and oscillators. Despite the seemingly contradictory approaches, both musicians share the search for processes in which feedback from circuits and sound as resonance take central roles.
As the performance progresses, both sound spaces become mixed. The tuning of the modular synthesiser, which was at first precise, becomes progressively unstable. The electronically processes textures, on the verge of chaos, condense, little by little, into almost recognisable pitches. The space between the two musicians transforms from a pretension of encompassing a stable form and becomes, rather, a free search to which the act of listening contributes. The musician listens, hesitates, and proceeds in small steps through contact, as if in a type of tactile listening.