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Reviews
Luigi Archetti / Bo Wiget
Low Tide Digitals III
Rune Grammofon RCD 2087
The WIRE / 307
September 2009
Low tide changes local horizons, exposes the beach and ist wildlife, changes the ambient sound, leaves you stilled and waiting to put out. This ist he third duo set from Archetti and cellist Bo Wiget. They were previously members of Affront Perdu and began the Low Tide Digitals sequence more than ten years ago, after meeting and beginning to collaborate in 1994. Though the pieces are numbered continuosly across the series – „Stück 1“ to „Stück 37“ so far – there are quite distinct breaks between the three CDs, or rather a steady substiling of communication between the two.
It’s no longer difficult to judge where acoustic -, more properly, instrumental-sounds have abbed into a purely electronic source. Where those divisions were elusive on I and II, on III it’s no longer worth the search, not least because Archetti’s gift for sonic as well as visual space – he’s also an installation artist, graphic artist and painter – is so highly developed. Guitar and cello sounds get round behind you like shorebirds at dusk. You don’t see the movement, other than an ambigous grey flutter somewhere in the exture. You only hear the haunting call, from a new place every time.
A previous WIRE review of Archetti/Wiget likened their collaboration to AMM’s music. That works, but only to a degree, and only perhaps beause of some remote coincidence of instruments: Cardew’s or Rohan de Saram’s cello; or Keith Rowe’s guitar. Certainly, it’s concentrated, egoless music, but with a naturalistic quality and an episodic structure AMM would have avoied. These pieces are all too consciously shaped. One doesn’t, tought, imagine them plonked and numbered in a sonic gallery. They retain a rich, mysterious, outdoor feel.
Brian Morton
www.boomkat.com
August 2009
The third installment in the long-standing duo's ongoing Rune Grammofon
collaboration, this album finds Swiss musicians Luigi Archetti and Bo Wiget
tackling another batch of artful, electronically treated improvisations.
Though strictly speaking this is a meeting between a cellist and a guitarist
there's a greatly expanded timbral range to these recordings, and typical
of the label's profile the sounds here occupy the shaded area of a wide-ranging
music-genre Venn diagram. Elements of neo-classical, jazz, and electronic
minimalism collide in a bewitching sonic mesh, all in a continual state
of flux between harmonious beauty and more abrasive, exploratory tones.
Certainly one of Rune Grammofon's more complex and musically adventurous
projects, Low Tide Digitals comes recommended to all followers of more
serious - and more difficult - electroacoustic music.
www.xlr8r.com
August 14, 2009
On their third installment for the Low Tide Digitals saga, Luigi Archetti
and Bo Wiget make their rounds again through the heart of the industrial
plant, passing by assembly lines of ungreased machinery and scorched
steam engines while draping a sheet of fine-tuned, acoustic instrumentation
over its foundation. Throughout its 14 movements, fried electronics
on the brink of combustion fume and spark in a nebula of distortion
and feedback while a wave of creaking cello and snarling bass creeps
in during its quieter moments. As the album sinks further into darkened
quarters, the overall climate gets a bit chilly, as the eerie hush
of silence is met with the occasional blast of cello or a pluck of
a mandolin.
Reviewed By Chris Sabbath
www.themilkfactory.co.uk
23. August 2009
For the third time in eight years, guitarist Luigi Archetti and cellist
Bo Wiget have joined forces for the time of an album, continuing their
sonic explorations at the confines of modern classical, experimental
jazz and minimal electronic, following Low Tide Digitals I and II, published
in 2001 and 2005 respectively, already on Rune Grammofon.
The two Swiss residents are very well established artists in their own
right. Italian-born Archetti has been an active member of German psychedelic
band Guru Guru for the last twenty years, and he also work as a painter
and multi-media artist, while Wiget studied cello at the Feldkirch Academy
and has since worked with various musicians and formations, often in
the field of improvisation, and also occasionally moonlights as a theatre
actor. The pair first worked together in 1995 when they were both part
of improv outfit Affront Perdu, which led them to collaborate on their
own common project a few years later.
Low Tide Digitals III follows the format of its predecessors, the fourteen
tracks collected here, sequenced Stück 24-37, resulting of improv sessions
where acoustic, electric and electronic components are tightly woven
together to form impressive textural atmospheric pieces. While the first
two instalments in the Low Tide Digitals series sometimes blurred the
boundaries of the pair’s respective contributions, this latest outlines
the extent of their musicianship more clearly. Wiget’s inputs provide
this album with much depth, his cello, in turn mournful (Stück 27, Stück
28, Stück 31), pastoral (Stück 25, Stück 35) or menacing (Stück 30),
rippling through these tracks like seismic shocks, while Archetti is
often found charging through with dense and abrasive clouds of distortions
(Stück 30, Stück 33), although occasional low-end saturation sometimes
bubble just below the surface, accentuating the emotional tension of
some of these pieces (Stück 24, Stück 27, Stück 28). Occasionally, he
adds brushes of mandolin to create a light counterpoint to his dark guitar
overtones (Stück 32, Stück 34).
These improvisations often range from the truly poetic and exquisite
to the dark and ominous, sometimes in the space of a few seconds, but
the overall album is actually extremely balanced, between calm and density,
between Archetti’s guitars, Wiget’s cello and their electronic treatments,
between challenging and accessible. With this third opus, the pair appear
to have opened up new grounds while remaining faithful to the previous
instalments in this series, and they undoubtedly have much more to offer
in the future.
http://missingsequences.wordpress.com/
September 2009 / Orangettecolemann
So I bought the new Fennesz record a few weeks ago at work and when Justin
asked what it sounded like, I replied “Oh, it’s another one of those
guitar/laptop records that I always buy” to which he replied “How much
of that stuff can you listen to without getting tired of it?”
Well guess what, HERE’S ANOTHER ONE!
Actually it’s a duo record with Luigi Archetti playing guitar, mandolin,
and electronics, and Bo Wiget playing cello and electronics. I have to
say that I really am reaching my saturation point when it comes to “guitar
through MAX/MSP” records, though. I loved the Keith Fullerton Whitman
“Playthroughs” record and the first few Fennesz records, but really that
latest Fennesz record bored me to death (this is my way of saying that
Justin was right). Everyone is doing the “strum a G chord through a granular
synth patch” thing these days, it seems. At first, the focus seems to
be on the cello here, though, and the result is something like Eno’s
“Discreet Music” string quartet pieces, buried in clouds of processing
and wind-blown digital dust. When the guitar starts taking a more prominent
role some ways into the record, it dumps out unexpected sheets of noise
and clanging drones instead of pretty shoegazing blandification; the
tension and contrast between the consonance of the rich cello sounds
and the almost industrial-sounding guitar makes the record even more
interesting to listen to. And of course the design by Kim Hiorthoy is
a big plus, as is always the case with Rune Grammofon releases. Sounds
like something I would listen to while watching a documentary about creepy
deep sea creatures like this:
www.badalchemy.de
August 2009
Luigi Archetti & Bo Wiget setzen ihre 1998 begonnene Partnerschaft
fort mit Low Tide Digitalis III (RCD2087). Archetti, Gitarrist & Mandolinenspieler,
aber auch bildender Künstler, ist also nicht nur profiliert durch Tiere
der Nacht mit dem Guru Guru-Drummer Mani Neumeier und Guru Guru selbst,
mit denen er Wischiwaschi wie Wah Wah (1995) & Moshi Moshi (1997),
aber auch das respektable In the Guru Lounge (2005) eingespielt hat.
Sein 16 Jahre jüngerer Partner an Cello und - wie auch Archetti - Electronics
hat sich neben Projekten wie Beide Messies oder dem Cello-Duo mit Simon
Lenski auch schon Lorbeeren auf der Theaterbühne erworben. Die Ebbe hier
ist erneut elektroakustisch durchdröhnt, manchmal so sonor und dröhnminimalistisch
wie melancholische Kammermusik von Gavin Bryars (‚Stück 25‘, teils ‚Stück
34‘) oder tristesseüberschattet wie das cellistische Memento Mori mit
Desertgitarre (‚Stück 35), meist voller dreamskapistischer Merkwürdigkeiten,
die nicht immer leicht einem Instrument zuzuordnen sind. Stehende Wellen,
mehr georgelt oder akkordeonistisch als gitarristisch, vermöbeln eher
die Imagination, als dass sie sie ambient möblieren. Raues Feedback durchknurrt
feine Stringgespinste, elektronisches Gebitzel und Gezwitscher überfunkelt
Klangfarbkörper, die langsam im Raum zu schweben scheinen. Sanfte Cellostriche,
flattrig gepinselte Gitarrensaiten, Pizzikatoklingklang, verschliffene
Loops, stechender oder pulsierender Noise öffnen den Blick, wie es sonst
nur Modern Art kann, abstrakt, minimal, konkret, op, informel...
Bad Alchemy (DE)
http://www.allaboutjazz.com
September 2009
Ambiguous and tenebrous, hypnotic and ethereal, the third installment
of guitarist Luigi Archetti and violinist Bo Wiget's Low Tide Digital
series is a profoundly human synthesis of the electro and acoustic. Each
of the fourteen "Stück" pieces is a vital voyage into the melding
of natural and digital timbres. The duo fully explores and stretches
the possibilities of their chosen instrumentation, mostly beyond any
definable recognition, into an otherworldly synthetic sea that bubbles
with tension, elegance and, importantly, humanity.
Repeated listens reveal a range of themes; each examined from a variety
of directions and, across the course of the album, delicately unfurled
to show the maximum possibility of every sonic experiment. Spritely melodic
bubbles fizzle and pop under granite ambient textures in " Stück
26." Sepharic sine waves, drenched in electronic manipulation, are
stretched momentarily in harmonic unison before each line's parallel
is slowly revealed in a trance-inducing quality, moaning like alien sea
creatures, on " Stück 27" and " Stück 31." On " Stück
28" and " Stück 29," deep bass throbs propel the experiments
in a similarly hypnotic quality, as finite layers of strings, plucked
or bowed, rest above the pulsating tones like ice sheets resting on shifting
tectonic plates.
The ingenuity of pairing Archetti and Wiget's guitar and violin is brought
to the fore on " Stück 25" and " Stück 37," simplistic
tone pieces built around each instrument's natural timbre and delicately
emphasized by subtle machinations. There is also the rare explosion of
pure white noise and mechanical disintegration, harnessed by the ferociousness
of Merzbow, to keep things on the edge; " Stück 30" is particularly
brutal.
The overriding arch of Low Tide Digitals III is built upon many faculties,
with most tracks including all or a variety of the described techniques.
This insures the discs' cohesiveness, with each element employed to sustain
a journey through its mercurial soundscapes. A likeness to the recent
output of Supersilent and Huntsville can be found in the way the duo
slowly builds its terrain of sounds, but these pieces feel more contained
and cerebral than their label mates,' with an aim to sustain rather than
rapidly diversify.
Produced with a high level of detail and empathy (an aspect sorely lacking
in similar electro-acoustic groups which are often overtly clinical and
academic), Archetti and Wiget have found a near perfect balance of blending
elements organic and electric into a mesmerizing amalgamation—all the
more dumbfounding, considering all the material is improvised. Rumoured
to be the final installment, this is a totally beguiling entrance into
an already impressive series and perhaps the apex of the duo's experiments.
Low Tide Digitals III is a fine edition to the Rune Grammofon catalogue—a
label at the forefront of new music—as well as an introduction to electro/acoustic
improvisation.
By David McLean
http://www.popmatters.com
16. September 2009
The third volume of collaboration between experimental European musicians
Luigi Archetti and Bo Wiget continues the duo’s unusual brand of electro-acoustic
improvisation. This fertile partnership is up to its 37th song (we know,
because each is numbered); rather than a linear progression, Low Tides
Digitals III plays more as a free-spirited exploration of whatever idea
next presents itself. Whereas Rune Grammofon’s more esoteric acts explore
noisier, more obtuse soundscapes, Archetti and Wiget are most comfortable
when elaborating sedate atmospheres built off string drones. Though things
can get suitably chaotic, they’re also not afraid of silence, and it’s
the moments of quiet subtlety that makes Low Tides Digitals III an unexpected
pleasure. “Stück 25” and “Stück 35”, for example, twist the simplicity
of open fifths out of all concept of tempo or rhythm. Occasionally, the
duo’s material has the restraint of a Chopin prelude. But these tone
poems, with their quite obvious mix of acoustic and electronic elements,
present this classical beauty firmly in a modern context. The world of
Low Tides Digitals III isn’t all roses, but there is a certain blissful
peace somewhere down in there.
By Dan Raper
www.squidsear.com
Oktober 2009
Here's where the Rune Grammofon label can make book on truly being the
ECM of this century. Where else might one find a former Krautrock-aligned
experimental guitarist working side-by-side with a contemporary cellist/sound
mangler? The label is fond of pairing seemingly at-odds folks together
to see what'll stick: in this case, it's fourteen "Stück"'s
emerging out of the rubbing of various strings, diodes, software and
knobs.
Not to belittle the first two volumes in this increasingly invigorating
series (though apparently this one will be the last), but Low Tide Digitals
III might well indeed prove that the third time's the charm. Guitarist
Archetti has a background that stretches back to the 70s halcyon days
of German prog/psych music, having spent time as a member of hippie freaksters
Guru Guru and making all kinds of innovative electronica with the more
diverse Tiere Der Nacht. Both he and Wiget share common goals: how to
moor their respective instruments to a quasi-recognizable context while
simultaneously bashing and thrashing about numerous idioms to forge unheard-of
vernaculars. This means that the pair stretch your ears in all manners
of vibrant and amusing ways: bending pitch, warping harmonics, treading
the fine lines between ambience and noise, trading on old standbys like
distortion just to make sure their audience is awake and paying attention.
As might be deduced, much happens here, and to be caught in the duo's
wake is to be seduced by their astute processes.
"Stück 24" opens up the environment with an Archetti guitar
twang that courts resemblance to a horror flick soundtrack, Wiget craftily
sculpting lines of distortion and peaking, red-line electronics that
course underneath like a Stygian undertow. Conversely, "Stück 26" is
a thing of abject beauty, the duo's fingerplucking marshalling a plaintive,
laptop ambience that is as much about the silence between digital curdles
as the curdles themselves. "Stück 27" augurs a Metal Machine
Music for the modern age, at least until Archetti and Wiget realize that
while momentum rocks, restraint can be just as galvanizing. The closing "Stück
37" actually reveals the recording in microcosm, Archetti's stately
airs playing vividly around Wiget's poised chords and sun-flecked electronics,
the guitarist occasionally rushing across the fretboard to provide a
sudden dramatic emphasis. Superb.
Darren Bergstein
www.junkmedia.org
September 30, 2009
Low Tide Digitals III is the latest collaborative album from Luigi Archetti
(guitar, electronics) and Bo Wiget (cello, electronics). The two Swiss
residents, both established artists in other fields such as painting,
dancing, and video, on this album of 14 improvised pieces explore the
interplay between texture and melody that results when electronics are
mixed with more traditional instruments.
In 2006 Archetti and Wiget produced a short video titled "I Have
Seen You Dancing Better Than This" which features the two dancing
wildly to a thoughtful, quiet soundtrack. It shows a welcome sense of
humor, as at first the brisk 3-minute rock and roll workout of the two
on screen seems to contradict the thoughtful, abstract music on the soundtrack.
But upon further consideration it's as if their dancing was a physical
manifestation, reflecting a different kind of emotion in the music. The
action doesn't come from a discernable beat, but from the interaction
between the two—from an exchange of ideas. Imagining an active duo like
the one in the video can help bring out unexpected facets of the music—it
accentuates the living, joking, human side.
However, this time Wiget and Archetti have produced a consistently gloomier,
more menacing album. If this is low tide, it's low tide at an imaginary
beach where the water becomes thick and dark as it recedes.
The first track (titled "Stück 24" in reference to the entire
body of work) is built around a prominent rising bass note, that seems
to just barely reach the level of the buzz and grit that surrounds it
before it dissipates. It keeps drifting up, but the surface becomes more
and more tumultuous as the song progresses. It can be difficult to tell
who produces what sound at any given time—while Wiget's cello is fairly
easy to spot with its moaning and buzzing, Archetti seems to concern
himself more with feedback and texture. And the electronic processing
seems to shoot between the two, sewing everything together. It's nice
how at any given time there aren't that many entirely distinct things
happening, but the duo choose very filling and appropriate textures.
The two men alone can produce dense sound when they want.
Highlights include the dive-bombing, swooping cello of "Stück 27," and
the surprise anchor of a clearly plucked note on "Stück 31." The
duo sometimes dip too far over into the digital side, letting some high
pitched processing chatter away much of the song, but one’s patience
is rewarded in most cases, such as the delicate melody that arrives only
at the very end of "Stück 26."
The numerical track titles offer little in the way of guidance, so one
is left to ponder the image suggested by the album title while listening
to the music. "Low Tide Digitals" could connect the music to
that moment between ebb and flow, when the water is still but crackles
and fizzes with potential, or maybe set the scene for the duo, knee-deep,
performing in the ocean. The electronics would be underwater and you
would see only the cello, guitar, and two performers. Despite all the
grumbling abstractions, this work still represents two people working
together, thinking together, and playing together.
Pat Dahn
SKUG / Musikzeitschrift, Wien
Nr. 80 / Oktober 2009
Erst wenn die elektronischen und instrumentalen Klänge abebben, wird
man sich der nachhaltigen Wirkung der vierzehn Stücke, die auch schlicht
einfach so benannt werden, bewust. Die akustische Klangobjekt-Sammlung
„Low Tide Digitals III“ mit „stück 24“ bis „stück 37“, dem dritten und
möglicherweise letzten Album einer Serie von freien Improvisationen von
Luigi Archetti und Bo Wiget zieht einen in ihren Bann, verleitet zu Fernweh
nach einem Ort, den nur die beiden für kurze Zeit erschaffen können.
Synthetisches Meeresrauschen, welches aus leren White Cubes zu strömen
scheint und sich unaufhaltsam seinen Weg bahnt. Es hinterlässt die einzelnen,
sensiblen Klangkonstrukte wie Treibgut im Gedächtnis zurück. Dankbar
und erfreut wie passionierte Muschelsammlerinnen am letzten Urlaubsabend
am Meere ihre angeschwemmten Fundstücke als Erinnerung aufbewahren, so
werden auch diese schillernden Akustik-Perlen an einem speziellen Ort
im persönlichen Musikreferenzgehirn abgelagert.
Michael-Franz Woels
http://www.experimusic.com
November 2009
As the distance between ourselves and our natural environment becomes
more and more vast, man has looked to various technologies to replicate
organic forms in which to remind us of the world we have left. It is
evident in our architecture; where buildings mirror or are intertwined
in natural forms. In our home furnishings with lighting devices replicating
all manner of flora and fauna. Even in our music, field recordings in
particular, where the unpredictability of nature is locked into a safe,
controllable stasis. Luigi Archetti & Bo Wiget’s Low Tide Digital
series is a unique experiment in destroying that stasis; a wild an unpredictable
synthesis of the electro and acoustic plucked from the ether, each album
has grown more feral, its marriage of these elements less controlled.
Every composition on Low Tide Digitals III is a vital voyage into the
melding of natural and digital timbres. The duo fully explore and stretch
the possibilities of their chosen instrumentation, mostly beyond any
definable recognition, into otherworldly synthetic soup that bubbles
with tension, elegance, but more importantly, profound humanity.
Upon repeated listens, it is revealed that the duo deal with a range
of themes. In each instance, these reoccurring themes are examined from
a variety of aspects across the course of the album, delicately unfurled
to show the maximum possibility of each sonic experiment. Spritely melodic
bubbles fizzle and pop under crystallized ambient textures in “Stück
26”, mirroring the aquatic vapors’ indicative of fellow Norwegian Espen
Sommer Eide’s Phonophani project. In numbers 27 and 31, seraphic sine
waves, drenched in electronic manipulation, are stretched momentarily
in harmonic unison before each line’s parallel is slowly revealed in
a trance-inducing dissonance. These swathes of overdriven tones unite
like the moans of cyborgenetic sea creatures in the deep ocean, sounding
at once organic and totally computerized. Deep bass throbs propel the
experiments in both “Stück 28” & “Stück 29” in similarly hypnotic
quality as finite layers of strings, plucked or bowed, rest above the
pulsating drones like sheets of ice on parting tectonic plates. Even
the inclusion of the most human instrument, Archetti’s voice, is overly
processed on the opening track, fluctuating with guitar string bends
to create a chant like reverberation that sounds shockingly alive.
The ingenuity of the pairing of Luigi Archetti’s and Bo Wiget’s guitar
and violin is clarified on “Stück 25” and “Stück 37”, simplistic tone
pieces built around the natural timbres of each instrument. There is
also the occasional explosion of pure white noise and mechanical disintegration
which undermines seemingly controlled elements of the album like the
unexpected eruption of a natural disaster, harnessed with the ferociousness
of Merzbow and Pan Sonic. While the tracks highlighted are examples of
each separate audio approach, the overriding arch of Low Tide Digitals
III is built upon each faculty with most of the tracks including all
or a variety of the above techniques. This insures the cohesiveness of
the musical journey with each element a necessity employed to sustain
the listeners travel through the mercurial soundscapes
Produced with a high level of detail and empathy (an aspect sorely lacking
in similar electro-acoustic groups which are often overtly clinical and
academic) Luigi Archetti and Bo Wiget have found a near perfect balance
of blending elements organic and electric into a mesmerizing amalgamation.
The duo breathes life into the most digitalized aspects of their music,
and rather than sound clinical, they throb with a totally organic life
force which is enhanced, not replicated, by digital augmentations. All
the more dumbfounding considering all the material is improvised; the
perfect approach to music composition which aims to describe the unpredictability
of mother nature. Rumored to be the final installment, this is a totally
beguiling entrance into an already impressive series and perhaps the
apex of the duos experiments. It triumphs in its elevation of the human
through electronic means.
David McLean
www.etherreal.com
27. November 2009
Comme on pouvait s’y attendre, le troisième album du duo Archetti & Wiget
s’intitule Low Tide Digitals III (après Low Tide Digitals I et II), paraît
quatre ans après son prédécesseur (lui-même paru quatre ans après le
précédent), sur Rune Grammofon et se compose de morceaux intitulés Stück
et numérotés en reprenant le décompte là où s’achevait Low Tide Digitals
II. Au-delà de ces aspects purement formels, la musique de l’Italien
et du Suisse semble s’être radicalisée avec ce nouveau long-format, proposant
davantage de sonorités acérées, de larsens et sifflements (Stück 25),
de poussées sonores intervenant sans crier gare (Stück 30). Ce sentiment
se trouve raffermi par l’impression de se trouver en présence d’une palette
moins large que par le passé,
Dans le même temps, le violoncelle de Bo Wiget paraît durcir son propos
tandis que les parties purement mélodiques ont quitté la guitare et la
mandoline de Luigi Archetti, attachées à présent à des considérations
emplies de saturation (Stück 33). Et puisque le dépouillement des titres
du duo est toujours présent, tout juste habillés par quelques oscillations
électroniques (Stück 26), on ne peut pas dire que ce Low Tide Digitals
III soit extrêmement facile d’accès (hormis quelques exceptions comme
Stück 33). Certes, c’était déjà le cas des autres disques du duo, mais
le parti pris s’est accentué ici, renforçant le caractère potentiellement
excluant d’une musique qui nous semble aujourd’hui plus probante dans
sa traduction scénique.
François Bousquet |
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