Ernesto Rodrigues - Assemblage e Ficta

Rodrigues/Rodrigues/Pauk/Oliviera Ficta [Creative Sources CD 005]	Rodrigues/Rodrigues/Mota/Oliviera Assemblage [Creative Sources CD 007]

Ernesto Rodrigues has been working with improvised music and modern forms of composition for over twenty years. Having performed under varied musical circumstances throughout Europe, he is a respected artist aligned with conceptualist thought and is gifted in the use of preparations with stringed instruments.   As with many radical 20th century musical figures, we can hear in his music the need to break free from tradition or current accepted practices (trends?), and displace those tendencies with untried methods. Great strides – a few of which are actually in the forward direction – can be witnessed in unlikely places. Like Poland and Greece, Portugal’s hub of Lisbon is fast becoming a dependable blip (at least to some of us in the US) on the growing map of groundbreaking music communities. And since we are alluding to tradition here, like New York, Berlin or Kyoto, those places are often identified in terms of art culture, by those who practice in the advancement of the art itself. Rodrigues falls into that group. But one might argue that progress is not the goal his music is currently seeking. Rather, it is process, and it can be heard in the documents of Assemblage and the earlier Ficta, where Rodrigues is joined by his son Guilherme (cello, pocket trumpet) and José Oliviera (percussion). The common thread between the two discs is in the dynamics of the music: were the activity to be graphed in terms of collective pursuit and sonic amplitude, both might be represented as bell curves, from restrained to semi-raucous. As a whole, the music is unassuming, insofar as the sounds can be measured against “threat.” There are some lovely passages, particularly on Assemblage, where guitarist Manuel Mota accentuates soft, sporadic tones with transients of his own.  Often we find that the sounds come as precious adornments (rather than conscious accomplices), while Rodrigues’ treatments (both literal and figurative) of the violin and viola make for an undercurrent that seem to define these discs’ structure, potency and attitude. Common to past and current systems of similar, explorative music, here there is no tempo. The element of time is completely lost as intention gives way to evolution. Gabriel Piauk’s piano on Ficta is critical in creating this sensation; his playing is quantifiable in terms of its function as mechanical counterpart, but fluctuates in and out of false signatures, an effect created by periodic, variable responses from the other instruments. Further illusory outcomes are achieved by Guilherme Rodrigues’ cello and the disciplined adventurousness of Oliviera’s inside-piano playing on Assemblage. There is much to be held in these quartets’ obvious structural ambiguity. Movable resources (inhibition, experience, technical depth) are at work in celebrating the freedom of improvisation while the musicians seek elusive parallels in one another through their music’s very transformation. This "new" music is highly recommended to both the adventurous and the passive listener. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

~Alan Jones