Battus Pascal / Monteiro Alfredo Costa

Pascal Battus: rotating surfaces
Alfredo Costa Monteiro: amplified paper

Recorded at Q-O2, Brussels, in July 2010 by Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Pascal Battus and Ludo Engels

The packaging for this CD is made almost entirely out of recycled paper

Fêlure is the second collaborative album between Pascal Battus and Alfredo Costa Monteiro -their first one, Ductile, was released on this very label (together with a question of re_entry) back in 2008. Not much, and a whole lot, has changed since then. The two musicians are still tirelessly exploring the very edges of tactile sonic exploration (in this duo and elsewhere), they are still working together –making this an ongoing collaboration, and not some one-off fancy that improvisers sometimes take to, and they still centre their work around the sounds produced by amplified paper.

Well, not quite. Battus is credited here with ‘rotating surfaces’, and though we can be pretty sure that his sounds are still sourced from the friction produced by this everyday material, perhaps this slight shift should indicate an overall distillation of purpose in the music of the duo. There is certainly a lot of added depth in the confrontational dynamics that these two bring forward here. Together with an intricate exploration of expanding time structures, Fêlure also goes a long way in conjuring some startling and somber soundscapes that –in themselves- make the work reach well beyond the level of your everyday curio. But even if you don’t care for all the above, you can still crank your speakers up and just enjoy this in all its abrasive glory, as it can also very well hold its own as a potent noise document.