Octante - Lúnula
Lúnula

Octante:
Ruth Barberán  -  trumpet, speaker & microphones
Alfredo Costa Monteiro - accordion & objects
Ferran Fages - oscillators & pick-ups
Margarida Garcia - electric bass

1. Onda 2856       28:56
2. Onda 2904       29:04

 Recorded in Barcelona, February 2008

Reviews

"The quartet Octante is a guarantee that the music might be a bit minimalistic.  Done.  The musicians pass under the lowest bar of limbo dance.  We have heard this kind of music before, but within given frames it is also possible to find new cavities for each instrument to find out what kind of echoes there are. Done.  The quartet creates a crackling and crunching kind of sound. It is being utterly condensed. It is not very easy even to separate the different instruments from one another. The quartet has turned into one common music machine. It is tight as a sore in a shoe!

Monteiro’s accordion breathes slightly asthmatically. Garcia’s bass acts as a pulse. Fages creates echoing sounds. And all of them are tightly embraced, moving the same sounds around. I came to think about the box with the music by Norweigan genius Svein Finnerud. On the DVD the musicians take part in a kind of musical happening, where they wrestle very slowly embracing one another turning over and over again half naked. I sense this music in the same way. It is very ritualistic.

And then Ruth Barberán!  Her trumpet changes between different sounds and moves as if she was swimming in deep waters.  It gives life to a music that could have been just a good piece among other good pieces. I do not know what it is, maybe the heat and passion, the persistence in forming the notes. It is indeed intense when she splits the stream of air into several small wet sounds. Or how close she is when Monteiro lets  the accordion breathe a little less breathlessly. They exhale and relax  together. Her tone is like wet woollen cloth over the others.  Her trumpet warms the music up. She takes it into elementary, atavistic and unsophisticated directions, giving it a sense of meditation. There are no pretty phrases left and she does not have to show off.  After the first quarter of an hour she  squeezes the notes to death. The accordion prepares a sweet bed for her.  But Garcia finds some simple beats and soon everyone is moving again in a strange singing ritual. And the music turns into a somnambulant state of mind.  They move between dreaming and wakefulness.  Time, space and direction stop.  Garcia plays a strange lullaby with her bow. On her own. Ok!? In the middle of the stream of music she plays a solo by her own, a room for a strange and utterly beautiful solo. Her introvert joy creates echoes among the others, before the sound disappears totally.

This is one way  to describe a part of this music. It is like a scene, it creates space and is full of events. As soon as you get used to the short sound you get your reward. And within the frame of this fairly  homogenous quartet you also notice some extraordinary musicians, especially Barberán.

But alas I have to finish with pointing out some shortcomings in this beautiful album. These Spanish musicians are not very well known across  the world. Why is there practically no information here? And also I wonder about the picture on the front;it resembles a picture by Kim Hiorthøy in the booklet of Original Silence The Second Original Silence. Could this really be a coincidence?… But last but not least: the music on this record is magnficient.”
Thomas Millroth, The Sound of Music

“Ferran Fages is a self-taught 35 year old from Barcelona, who started out in rock but then moved simultaneously into electronics and a solo style that plugs deep into flamenco roots.  He’s heard using oscillators and pick-ups for the mysterious, trumpet-led Lunula, teamed with the impressive Ruth Barberán, accordionist Alfredo Costa Monteiro and electric bassist Margarida Garcia.  The group music is softly fractured, elusive, ends and beginnings elided and the tone at times almost disturbingly intimate.  It’s possible here and there to tease out Fages’s contribution, and it’s surprising to hear how consistent a soundworld he inhabits.  Like his guitar playing, his electronics work reaches impressively for duende, that untranslatable sorrow/joy/anger/love/death spirit that suffuses Iberian culture and defines Catalan art in particular.  Ferran Conangla’s mixing gives the music an intense presence, like something that unfolds unheard and in the head.  It adds another fine disc to Another Timbre’s already impressive list.”                                                            -Brian Morton, The Wire

“The Barcelona-based trio of Ruth Barberán, Ferran Fages, and Alfredo Costa Monteiro have created a handful of strong releases as a trio, surveying the outer timbral frontiers that can be created from trumpet, accordion, and resonant objects. They've also collaborated with bassist Margarida Garcia, releasing their eponymous recording six years ago on the l’Innomable label. While on the earlier release it was almost impossible to tell the sound sources of the various threads, the players are more at ease letting the intrinsic nature of their instruments come through on the two half-hour long improvisations captured here. Barberán’s trumpet can sputter or screech with a scrubbed brassiness, Costa Monteiro pushes his instrument to reedy overtones and lets its air-driven organ-like drones shake through the group, Fages's oscillators and pickups send out skirling sine waves and buzzing groans, and Garcia’s electric double bass accentuates the dark, full tones of her instrument, using electronics to subtly extend the textures. There is a restless intensity to this music, but the performers never lose the collective thread. The second piece is a bit more open than the first, and the four let long tones and drones hang and reverberate off each other, slowly gathering force and density. The pristine recording lets every nuance come through. It's another compelling entry from these musicians and yet another in an incredible line of winners for Another Timbre.”
Michael Rosenstein, Paris Transatlantic