Marcos Fernandes
Hybrid Vigor
Accretions
A quietly impressive album of ambient global-world music from improviser Marcos Fernandes, a founding member of the percussionist Trummerflora Collective. Combining edited tapes of found sounds with digital noise, percussion and slight, angular jazzy moods, Fernandes conjures up a world caught between the old and the new, the magic and the logic, the organic and the electronic. An ambitious project, and one done to death over the course of the last few decades, but Fernandes, with his humble approach and meditative ambience, somehow manages to bring something new and interesting to such a setting.
Tracks like “Science Boy” and “Bullets For Ballots” are by far the most successful on here, effectively fleshing out the album’s project in both method and sound. Contrasting with those fine tracks are more tired and repetitive tracks like “Undercurrents” that offer little in the way of either musical interest or conceptual clarification. The longish “The Orange Line” may be regarded as the album’s centerpiece, pulling together the various threads running through the album, but is too heavily dependent on experimental fusion jazz to actually take the album to its logical conclusion. And it is the unassuming whisper of “Scintillation” that savors the project, quietly and carefully making final and preliminary concluding sense to Fernandes’ bold undertaking.
Accretions Records: http://www.accertions.com
