VITAL WEEKLY

Maybe you remember Ubeboet from Spain? That was the name chosen by Miguel Angel Tolosa, who these days abandoned the name Ubeboet and uses his own name. Tolosa studied composition with Antoine Beuger and electroacoustic music with Jean Claude Risset and Eduardo Polonio and there is not a lot of difference between the work he created as Ubeboet and Tolosa. He's not interested in any 'extramusical contents', such as of religious, political or commercial things, but "the object of his music is the experience of time through listening with an additional, subtle emotional element. Music as time made audible, music as beauty made to sound". Perhaps this is something more of an oddball release for Sofa Music. So far their releases had real instruments, even when perhaps not conventionally played. In the case of Tolosa I would think there is a lot of computer processing going on, in which he transforms a lot of other sounds, which might be field recordings, acoustic sounds or synthetic/electronic sounds, into a gentle microsound mass of ambient sounds. Sometimes a bit dark but gentle it surely is. I can imagine this might be something new in the living room of Sofa Music, but in the world of Vital Weekly it is something that is hardly unusual. Not a single week passes without a release that consists of field recordings, software and processing resulting in something very much ambient. That is not to say that Tolosa released a CD that is 'bad', actually far from it; it is just not something that is very new. What Tolosa does, he does very well. In the ten relative short pieces, ranging from one and half minute up to almost nine minutes, we hear a fine variety of approaches on these sounds and the result is very much dark, microscopic and atmospheric, but as said with a fine amount of variety in the shades these pieces will put on your wall.