Tomlab-Planctonmusic

www.tomlab.de

Historic, but not actually. This anthology was lovingly collected, edited and produced by Rafael Toral and includes a cross section of early Portuguese electronic musicians both known and little-known outside his native Portugal. The time range is between the late 1970's until the mid 1990's, but Toral chose to present them in his own order rather than a chronological one. The CD feels like a single work, a strong argument for the realignment and de-centralization of historical electronic music. Great electronic music also happened outside of the usual cultural centers, and this is a nice example of it in wider circulation.

Many tracks on this disc sound like standard academic avant-guard using the normal devices of the genre. But taken as a whole, there is something unmistakably different about the feeling of these works. Since the methods are more or less the same as anywhere else (studio gear, great masses of wires, synths, tapes, etc.), it is interesting to imagine how this sound developed its own broth apart from other creative milieu.

The recurrent theme in these works is a sense of melancholy: decaying beauty and danger swimming in ambient backgrounds. And, although the work is formal, it is also emotional, the feelings of the musician are present as much as the engineering. Of course, Toral's work has these same characteristics. But did he select works according to his style, or did his style come from the environment suggested by these very works? Portugal suffered from 50 years of dictatorship, which explains why electronic music only flourished so late there (since the 1970's). The crawling blues of the music matches the uneasy calm that the population must have felt at the time.

There are a few rough edges like an unapproachable track by Candido Lima, but overall an ambitious and logically incomplete document of Portuguese electronic music.

a. bergman