Trumpeter on the pantheon

Susana Santos Silva - All the Rivers, Live at Panteão Nacional (2018)

Solo improvisation done right - again! - in an excellent rejoinder to Carlos Zíngaro's Solo, also recorded in a major monumental space, and making full use of it as an echo chamber that can actually serve to engage reflexively in an open-ended dialogue with oneself, and not just to toot one's own horn. As the building extends a bedrock of drony reverb, both following the instrument's thrusts and queuing subsequent ones, the performance is organized by design around an artefactual call and response dynamic that, interestingly, echoes some electroacoustic experiences, but ingeniously executes them in non-electro, luddite fashion. In that regard, it could almost be taken as a practical exposé, by counterexample, on how the undiscerning fascination with technological novelty in artistic production can occasionally get to be aesthetically redundant, just lazy, or even backwards.

Proto-acousmatic explorations of refractive space instead of "zero tolerance for silence"? Noice.

Fiddler on the monastery

Carlos Zíngaro - Solo (1992)

Solo improvisation done right, in the right architectural atmosphere, by the portuguese father figure of that scene. A bit more tongue in cheek, and Zíngaro's record could actually have been called Duo, as you find him very deliberately playing off the architecture (also making me dance about it now) in a fascinating game of acoustic squash that lays the ground for an actual dialogue with his acousmatic self, through which the whole performance can aesthetically grow.

Instant composition and sound design instead of all random screeches? That's refreshing.