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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
14. August 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.
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