cuhda by llumm

Cuhda is the palindromic name of Adhuc, the previous release by LLUMM for Amplified series in september 2020. Metaphorically, it works as an echo or a kind of mirror effect and was composed as a continuity, developping similar parameters, such as resonance, decay or timbrical particularities and keeping the same instrumentation. It also works as a point of inflection for a new creative episode, planned for the next year.


*REVIEWS*

Ferran Fages and Alfredo Costa Monteiro activate a 25’ electromagnetic environment for electric guitar and resonant objects and electronics on cuhda. The air is electric. Soundings emit auras, ghostly tremolos, motion-blurred electron fields, in their vibratory half-life but even seemingly in their non-intervention, always haunting the space, humming, as if the duo has activated a generative environment that is as much a character in the drama as they are, a field of coils manifesting a magnetic wind in the residual harmonics and their swaying in it like blades of grass. Beyond the delay and decay, metallic timbres feed back into this electric vision, the acidic attack of spiderlike strums, guitar chimes and jangles as if a piano was struck on its body or inside, strings galvanic thwacks against the soundboard, and the arced trajectories of high-tension plucks like those of particles on course for collision. The duo moves together in collaged forms, dwelling in new timbres for a time together, molding their shape in attack, decay, and the durations of soundings and silences, these flashbulbs of a nonlinear dream tethered together by the ectoplasm of the everpresent environment. - Keith Prosk www.harmonicseries.substack.com

Cuhda is a duet of similar dimensions, assembled over a longer period of time and finished this year. The duet LLUMM has Fages back on electric guitar, with Alfredo Costa Monteiro on “resonant objects” and electronics. It’s described as “an electromagnetic environment”, which seems appropriate as plucked percussive objects are amped and reverbed against guitar drone. Struck and bowed objects produce sounds which merge with distorted guitar, each pitch distempered by upper partials that preclude clear harmony, with one or two startling exceptions. While it’s as portentous as For John Ayrton Paris, Cuhda shows a greater presence of the musician’s hand in performance, with sounds more clearly sourced in human activity. Where the earlier work presents sounds without complication, Cuhda disturbs the surface by introducing pauses, changes of mind and a fallibility in how each sound is made. It’s particularly unusual how this feeling-out process is preserved in what is the more deliberately constructed piece.-Ben Harper
http://www.cookylamoo.com/boringlikeadrill/

LLUMM is the new project of Alfredo Costa Monteiro and Ferran Fages, started in spring 2018.
Alfredo Costa Monteiro: resonant objects and electronics
Ferran Fages: electric guitar

llumm.net
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