collected reviews of carlos villena ‘oscil.lacions en la penombra de les taques solars’
above, review by ned @ wasistdas, check out his original review and nicely idiosyncratic website here: www.wasistdas.co.uk
frans de waard @ vital weekly:
more music by carlos villena (see also vital weekly 730 and 733), who works under his own name and runs the mantricum label. this is the first time we hear his music solo. the field recordings he has captured have a solar origin, although I’m not sure how they were captured. but they are fed into the audio mixer and mixed together. Its all pretty noise oriented but in a sort of fine way. villena uses the collage form, rather than the endless noise attack, to create various sections that fade into eachother. for all we know this could be any sort of field recording, even street sounds. an effective work however of drone/noise/collage sound which stays away from the careful crackling work of microsound. nature is noise enough, as someone once remarked, and villena knows how to twist that into a fine piece of noise of nature.
vital weekly 737 and podcast, june 2010
ian holloway’s review from wonderful wooden reasons:
spanish noise musician villena uses processed field recordings to produce his music. it’s a fairly austere experience laced throughout with a scathing dissonance. noise music really doesn’t do it for me anymore but I can still appreciate when it’s being done well and this is. it’s restrained and mobile. villena explores his sound source thoroughly and isn’t averse to mixing things up a little which raises him above the usual distortion-mongers.
original webpage here:
