edu comelles - agost

Comelles is not exactly a young and emerging talent, nor an artist knocking on every career-booster platform around. He’s one of the most interesting artists on the experimental music scene in Spain. His work ranges from solo compositions to collaborations with several musicians. He can go from assembling DIY microphones to test DSP softwares and mobile to edit and curate Audiotalaia his own label; or even devote himself to research on site-specific installations at the verge of sonic creation. His restlessness and forward thinking places him beyond the experimental scene that saw him growing. A difficult task is to tag him on narrow genres. Ok, yes! You might say he’s an experimentalist, but with a musical depth shooting on multiple directions.

With more than 10 albums on its back and a few more other collaborations, Agost is a new challenge and a twist in his career. An album created only using one single, one minute sound recording containing the sounds of rubbing the edge of a coup of wine with his fingertips. That unique premise, once listened, reveals itself trivial as we accommodate into the lazy hedonism of a summer end and its sonic landscape. The real tour-de-force is to achieve a musicality with that single element, to achieve colourful harmonies full of contrast and saturated ambiences. And specially, Comelles achieves a beautiful musical dialogue with cello, piano, drums and electric guitar, gathering all together the talents of Sara Galán, Lucy Claire, Avelino Saavedra and Fernando Junquera. They all add and rest, take and put, back and forth talking with the artist. Now that winter is coming, Agost is the perfect album to rejoice the fainting sunset light of a summer afternoon. An album that irradiates lightness and an inusual intensity. Agost is an ideological homage to sampling, with more winks to Herbert and Matmos than to Pierre Schaffer, where the idea of the laziest period of the year and the summer ending concept unfolds into minutes of placidity and tension; Field recordings are embedded into its DNA, drums aged on oak casks, and a summer that – unlike Fennesz’s – it really ends, giving way to autumn. Wood and digital Ambient.