English translation from the original Ukranian by the author.

ALEJANDRA AND AERON
Porto (Folklore Fragments, Volume 2)
CD, Lucky Kitchen, 2005

Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman are a couple of
artists active in non-academic computer music. They released this remarkable
compact disc on their own label Lucky Kitchen. The title contains the
words "folklore fragments" and the disc includes no computer music at
all. Nonetheless, in a sense, it challenges computer, as well as
contemporary "experimental" music; it makes it think about its
raison d'etre once again.
The disc presents 24 recordings of "folk life" made in
various parts of the 1.5-million Portuguese city of Porto. Alejandra and
Aeron spent two months in the centre of Porto (and on its outskirts)
documenting sound manifestations of the city's everyday and non-everyday
life. Most of these sound manifestations are what we are used to call
"noises": domestic sounds, background conversations, industrial sounds,
street roaring that is what directly surrounds us every day and what we
don't often deep listen to. Side by side with "noises" on these
recordings there is also "music" coming from the indoor radios;
accompanying the rites and festivals; women sing washing and rinsing their linen in a
public laundry; tunes played by workmen to try their music instruments;
and finally "folk music" performed by a local folklore ensemble. This
"music inside music" is like people's visages in a photo album
looking at pictures you can pay attention to faces only, but also you can view
a shot as a whole and see how figures and spaces, light and shadows
correlate. I used here the phrase "music inside music" on purpose. Each one of
the 24 audio-pictures is characterized by expressive and
purposeful compositionality. These are not merely random everyday
noises taped by somebody without order or dissembled thought! From among
all the recordings made by Alejandra and Aeron in Porto, they elaborately
selected just those fragments where sounds would correlate with each other as
elements of a music piece. And since Alejandra and Aeron are people, who
are perfectly aware of the subtleties of "experimental" electronic
music, the musicality of the fragments recorded by them in Porto is
the musicality of exquisite, delicate and serious sound design.
Extracting sound design from "field recordings" is not
new; one can recall here names such as Luc Ferrari and Chris Watson
(and a good many other names). But Alejandra and Aeron's sound design is
neither Ferrari's musique concrete, nor Watson's documentation of exotic sound
environments. Alejandra and Aeron document not the exotic, but the
"ordinary" and document it as is, that is without editing, cutting or
pasting the sounds (the only thing they allow themselves to do in
"editing" is to choose where a fragment starts and stops). In addition,
when recording people's working weekdays and celebrations Alejandra and
Aeron don't give them any instructions, don't ask them to "pose" or
respond to the fact that they are going to be recorded, in a special way.
The only occasion when such "intrusion" took place was
when Alejandra and Aeron, recording the music exercises of a group of
folk enthusiasts from a town near Porto, asked two young singers, Rita and
Adriano, to sing a song without instrumental accompaniment. It was unusual for
Rita and Adriano as they were used to sing with accompaniment only, so their
performance got from time to time choked with giggles (Adriano imitated
accompaniment with his voice, giggling at his own attempts); the intonation
of their singing constantly fluctuated and "hesitated" in its longing
for being not forced. It may seem like mere "poor singing" came out
of this undertaking. However, for Alejandra and Aeron this sketchy
simplicity with which the snapping of fingers and the singer's voice
suggest accompaniment, and these fluctuations of singing
intonation between awkwardness and naturalness, seem to have been the most
valuable features of this recording: firstly, an additional dimension of a folk
song, and secondly, a source for compositional formation and conflict. Actually, such
a "non-puritan" notion of "folklore" is the ideological foundation upon which rests the
meaningfulness of all the recordings making this album.
Folklore and, folk art are not simply idealized and preserved products of artists from
the country: no, the people do arts constantly, and folk arts are a complex of the archaic and innovative, rural and urban, and this complex always changes, it is always in making.
Folklore in its brightest appearances is characterized by universality
expressed in the most direct way. That's why it seems to me that
"Porto" is justly subtitled "folklore fragments".
Its content is very direct: the disc is "simply" an audio-portrait of a city, but at
the same time it is something more, an anthropological poem in sounds, a
collection of eloquent and aphoristic audio-situations.
This combination ofdirectness, eloquence and aphoristic manner is miles ahead
of the majority of contemporary sound design; sound design and
"experimental" music that primarily achieve one of these qualities at the expense of
the other two, or two at the expense of a third. Yet the listener of "Porto" is mostly the
"experimental" listener as the label Lucky Kitchen is especially known
in "experimental" and electroacoustic circles. This is the listener who
is ready to listen to Alejandra and Aeron's recordingsof "folk life"
as music. And it is he who has an opportunity here to seriously scratch his
head. Because, for example, the album opener: a recoding made in a
barbershop: quick and rhythmic clicking of scissors, plus soft drone of cars
passing by outdoors, plus a sentimental pop ballad from the radio; this
track is disclosing the essence of the whole lot of "click and cuts"
production that swarmed the world, spitting on its face at the same time!
Having heard this track only an idiot will continue to believe in
"clicks and cuts". The sonic environment of the barbershop
is a laconic and graceful aphorism that successfully neutralizes the whole
style. This is not limited to the first track only. Later listening to the disc we
encounter a handful of similar situations when a trend in contemporary music
is questioned, if not neutralized and shamed, by one short audio aphorism
from "folk life". Thus, the recoding of knife grinders (father and son)
can easily meet competition with works by Merzbow or Koji
Asano; the recording of a festivity called "The Dance of the
Moors" can give food for thought to masters of industrial collage of the
1980's; the recording of horns which fishermen in the boats breathe shed a
betraying light on German kosmische musik of 1970's; and the recoding of
myriads of euphoric car horns, produced by happy fan drivers after the
Portuguese football team had beaten the English team, successfully rubs the nose of
Christian Fennesz himself. Tracks 14 and 15 (recorded in workshops where
musical instruments are being made) contain passages that would not be foreign
even on the best improv albums released by labels such as Creative Sources
or For4Ears; and track 19 (preparations for wine testing) can be taken as
chaffing at the oscillator avant-garde of the 1960's. And finally, one
can assume that some of the more "cacophonic" fragments included in
"Porto" (like the recording of a festival in the village of Sobrado) are
capable of serving a weighty counterargument against the universalist
ambitions of, say, Stockhausen's Hymnen, for the intense
universe of attractions and repulsions, which sounds of "folk
life" breathe with, more complex, multi-layered, multi-faceted and at the same
time justifiable (because of its vitality) than Stockhausen's sound chimeras
delivered schemes and plans.
Of course, this album should not be regarded exclusively as our answer to
formalists. First and foremost, it is a story of common people's life.
Each track is commented in the disc booklet that describes where a
particular track was recorded. The comments warmly,carefully and
respectfully tell us about the people in the audio-picture, not about the
formal features of the audio-picture. However, these formal features are
also there. A question arises: what if they produce the impact, which is
potentially contained in them, upon the listener? If we presume that the
larger part of contemporary music is really neutralized
for somebody, and the listener, used to deep listening to skilful sound
design, will leave this leisure and will start, motivated by the recordings
of "folk life" to deep listen to the vortex of sounds around him at
one time rough, at the other silenced, polyphonic, pointillistic, but always
horizonless and listen to it and find buried treasures in it|. Will this
activity guide the listener to some understanding? And what will this
understanding be? (Bammm!!!) (...) Can you hear the
great formalists, the great lunatics and utopists coming for your soul?
(...) Can your tottering humaneness resist their appeals?..)

Andrij Orel

Link to the original Ukranian review in the magazine "Autsaider" :

http://www.autsaider.org/issues/6/vj/alejandra_and_aeron.shtml