'Stepping Stone' is one more of those works. Again, João takes the 'single piece' approach for added immersive experience. The piece shapeshifts through its thirty-two minutes and a half course, filled with highly textured sound palletes. A focused listener will find at least three distinct 'movements' in this piece, or better yet, three core ones with an additional smaller interlude-ish one. The second main movement is an organic symphony made from string notes colliding and overlapping themselves into repetitive loops. The final and last movement - and my favorite - starts with a dub ambient approach to a sci-fi drama; dense and heavy and glitchy, and rapidly turns into a full glitch/field recording/improv. long finale, with warm, rubbed-out edges of awesomely (is that a word?) well made ambient.
Someone once wrote in a review that there's never a dull or boring moment in João Ricardo's works, and that never was so absolutely and undeniably true as it is now.» - Pedro Leitão
«Don’t let the initial softness of João Ricardo’s new release on the Test Tube netlabel, Stepping Stone, lull you into any sense of comfort. Fissures will strike, and small noises will make themselves known, in rhythmic patterns that are more verbal than metrical, more about the insinuation of life than about effecting momentum.
Those early, subtle swells, given texture from an economical employment of static, eventually make way for a suite-like, long-form, half-hour performance (MP3). Later in the piece, alternate techniques will be brought to be bear on string instruments, heard in looping patterns of loosely strung guitar, then smatterings of rough percussion, then dark and claustrophobic scratchy explorations, before closing with an almost soothing (key word: almost) stretch of minimalist sound design.
Stepping Stone is, admirably, a single-song release, which is a format particularly suitable to netlabels, where music is made available for free download and distribution by the musician and releasing organization. The compression of the musical experience into one, individual, standalone track adds to the immediacy of the experience, and thus to the sense of unmediated communication between artist and audience.
Ricardo, recording as OCP (or Operador de Cabine Polivalente), isn’t here just stringing together diverse modes. For example, those loose strings connect to the rough percussion thanks to the manner by which the analog source material fits into the electro-acoustic setting, and the subsequent claustrophobia is impressive precisely because of the exit of the more organic sounds that had appeared earlier. Like any successful suite, this one is marked by narrative intent, one that compels and rewards close listening.» - Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet)
Download (.zip)
