Umbra for modified AM radio and home-made oscillator

“Umbra was recorded in 2010 in Barcelona. I used a modified AM radio and a home-made oscillator. I found the radio in the street the previous year, discarded outside a huge warehouse full of electronic ‘garbage’. I took it to my studio and modified it using circuit-bending techniques.

Umbra is comprised of ten short pieces. In most of them I played only the modified AM radio, in others just the oscillator, and in some both.”

Juan Matos Capote is an artist from the Canary Islands living in Barcelona. He was academically trained as a visual artist, and soon began to incorporate onomatopoeias within his paint-ings and sculptures which dealt mainly with perception. Later on he began to work with sound, building his own devices, generators and registers. Nowadays his work combines both interests. In his performances, he makes use of analogue equipment such as home-made oscillators, circuit-bent toys, radios, hydrophones and other modified electronic devices. Many of his circuits are characterised by random, yet control-lable, behaviours.

www.juanmatoscapote.net

Mastered by Álex Gámez

More info and audio at: http://www.entracte.co.uk/project/juan-matos-capote-e133//

First edition of 200 copies.

“The music here has a very elemental, raw feeling, about as far from the polish of the contemporary mainstream as you could possibly get. Capote has taken AM radios, plus an oscillator he has constructed himself, and by inserting fingers and other items into the circuitry has developed a quite remarkable way of shaping the output of these seemingly wild and uncontrollable tools to create music. Entirely to his credit, Capote, on this release, makes no attempt to bury his sounds behind other elements, and places this wildly difficult to constrain set of sounds right in the foreground alone, with nothing else to distract you. So we hear scratchy, searing blasts of sound, bare and unadorned, wild scribbling, detuned abstraction and nothing else. There is no sense of layering, just the immediate sounds left exposed to be taken in….”
Richard Pinnell at The Watchful Ear