Do not try to think too much about what you’re hearing when listening to El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics); you’ll end up tying yourself into intellectual knots while trying to rationalise why you’re digging it, which is part of the point. The album is a collaboration between Alvaro Daguer, Pablo Picco, Tomás Salvatierra and Mark Harwood, making a loose alliance between Chile, Argentina, Australia and Germany with no stated motivation or justification, leaving the implication that they just wanted to make music together, of some kind. It starts off sounding crude, like amateurish outsider art, but the types of sounds being used in the thudding processional are incongruously sophisticated. The instrumentation is a wilfully eclectic mix of South American, Oriental and Western with electronics added to the folklore, ensuring that from whichever viewpoint the music may be considered as Exotica. The sound of unfamiliar instruments triggers the reflexive thought that we should approach this at least partially as anthropology, which sits uneasily with the perception that the cultural references here are being made up on the fly (it could be heard as psychedelia, but not as Tropicália). It doesn’t take long for it to stop sounding crude, but it reserves the right to regress whenever the mood takes. Some of the tracks are downright lyrical, with added prettiness of nature recordings, while others verge on the ritualistic (a good covering term when you don’t understand the purpose). In all this effortless confusion, the music carries on the work left off by Kagel, an Argentinian composer all too aware of the slipperiness between centre and periphery, wrestling with unknown instruments and asking difficult questions about authenticity and cultural transmission, realising the two are fundamentally incompatible. Reading the fine print, the album appears to have been created in stages, being recorded in one country then forwarded to the next for reworking, further complicating any lurking agenda. As I suggested, it’s only difficult if you start thinking about it, otherwise you can just enjoy the cruise.
Jardín de las Matemáticas has been released by Penultimate Press, who have also put out C.D., the new album by Ralf Wehowsky under his RLW alias. It’s a pair of large works (40 and 50 minutes) dealing with the subject of Colonia Dignidad, a German evangelical cult settled in Chile in the 1960s. In their remote compound, cut off from the wider world, the inevitable squalid crimes and atrocities took place, with the added twist of the knife coming from their collaboration with the Pinochet regime and the German diplomatic officials reluctant to probe beyond the idyllic German facade the cult leaders portrayed. RLW’s collages are never dense in texture but he heavily works the materials and approach for his subject, making each sprawling soundscape an indirect picking over of the colony’s legacy (victims still seeking justice, the compound itself now a tourist resort). When speech is audible, it’s heavily processed to push it past intelligibility, regardless of your language comprehension. Much of the material appears in the form of overlaid improvised melodies realised on MIDI instrument patches, adding another distancing layer. The first piece (Reue?) draws inspiration from the contradictory testimonies of those involved in the colony, the second (Knochenstückchen) focuses on the repressive and paranoid atmosphere of the place. Both are indistinct in their treatment of the matter, shifting focus away from the sensational and exploitative to brood upon the collapse of values and what this may mean in terms of music. While much collage is geared towards the didactic, C.D. stays unresolved, turning over fragments of bad memories that many would rather had been forgotten.
