| January 2006 news
January 25, 2006
LIVE DOPE
Our friends from DOPO will premiére themselves live at the infamous ZDB Gallery, next week, February 4th. Veados com Fome and Lobster will join them that night. You can expect a rather weird gig, where the festivities will range from instrumental noise rock to sweet hippie lullabies. We're so there!
Before that, this saturday 28th, Phoebus will open for the amazing Murcof. Place is the same, ZDB Gallery. :)
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January 23, 2006
GHOST CITIES AND HAUNTED PIANOS
• tube'|034 - Minus Pilots & Kenneth Kirschner - Unlit Cities
«In the first half of the twentieth century, the basic concepts of contemporary art and avant-garde were almost automatically connected to the ideology of progress. New York was the center of the world, a center "illustrated" by the gestures of Pollock's action painting, by the dripping of Kooning's grotesque work (see Women) and by a vast supply of right hemispheres capable of creating an equal whole without a central focus.
Music gave birth to Feldman and Cage, Busoni's pupils, and all of them were improvising textured pieces, registries and intervals, some of which with more than 6 hours.
Kenneth Kirschner, since he begun his recent work with Taylor Deupree, has demonstrated that if he was more than 60, he was surely to be a member of the New York School. In this particular improvisation work, Kenneth samples and manipulates some tail piano's notes, while British duo Minus Pilots picks up where he left and tries to tame the empty spaces, through a minimal digitalization, almost microscopic and microtonal. This experimentalism-based sound ornamentation is able to establish some kind of well structured "open source", but capable of an entirely non-patterned functional freedom, for a sound progress without an end, just like in Feldman's works. One of the best releases I've heard in a while, and an excellent start for 2006. Amen!» - Bruno Barros
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January 14, 2006
MONKEY IN THE MACHINE
• tube'|033 - Símio Superior - Como na Rádio
«Símio Superior is André Abel, also a member of the noise-funk band Dance Damage and one half of electronic experimentalists Tropa Macaca. He is solo here, manipulating samples to extreme sounding conditions, achieving some interesting and repetitive percussion forms.
Travelling close to industrial territory, Símio Superior (roughly translated to 'Simian Sapiens' from portuguese) sounds like a noise-rock band, without the drums and guitars, pushing noise boundaries to the limit, but never getting too close to feel the pain.
Keeper is the drone shaped 'Carabina, latrina' with an oblique glitchy sounding circular movement, but that's not all. 'Tez morena' grabs some voices sampled from the Animal Collective's repertory, cuts them to pieces, drowns them into sulphuric acid and bangs them into a wall while listening to some weird sounding african drums. Terrifying shit, I tell'ya.
'Laranja papaia' is the cleanest track of the lot (by André Abel's terms, that is...) with a nice little background hiss and chiming little bells, while the artist gently whispers something unintelligible into our heads. Creepy and great uneasy listening.» - Pedro Leitão
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January 04, 2006
DELICACY OF TEST TUBE
Japanese Acowo website dedicates this week to Test Tube. They called it 'Delicacy of Test Tube'. It's a kind of a 'best of' week. We're very flattered, of course :)
Thanks for being so kind, Kengo! and a Happy New Year!
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January 01, 2006
BRAND NEW, YOU'RE RETRO
2006 is here.
Although just an invention of the calendar, an year change is handy and gives us a good excuse to make those nice best-of-the-year lists, flashback into those moments, curse the bad ones, etecetera. We're not different here at test tube headquarters, so let's see how was 2005 for us, statistically:
- 25 releases (13 hours 38 minutes and 20 seconds of music in 1,2Gb);
- 9 portuguese releases from 8 different artists including 6 all new;
- 9 countries and 3 continents present;
- around 31780 unique visitors and 49498 visits;
- 162237 pageviews;
- 2026566 total hits, which gives more than 5500 hits per day;
- 186,18Gb transfered.
Plus, we got dozens of reviews in several websites and weblogs, most of them nice. Our reputation (if any) has grown, as well as the number of demos received through post and e-mail.
A couple of releases were even featured in best-of-the-year lists, among regular releases from regular labels. So, we're very happy because many people like what we're doing. And that's all we need to keep it going.
Now it's thank-you-time. Our big thanks go to (in no particular order):
Pedro Rios, André Gomes, Rodrigo Nogueira, Miguel Azevedo, César Laia, Luís Marta,
José Marmeleira, Luís Florêncio, Darren McClure, Johannes Hätscher, Laurent Lusseau, Bituur Esztreym, Xesús Valle, Rui Gato, Adam Barringer, Eduardo Chagas, Kengo Miyazaki, David Velez, Filippo@Zymogen, Afonso Simões, Tiago@Merzbau, Fernando@MiMi, Pedro Gomes, Rafael Toral, Carsten Nicolai, Francisco López, Adriana Sá, Henrique Pinto Alves, Miguel Ángel, and to everyone who contributed in some way. Hope we didn't miss any of you.
Many thanks to all for supporting test tube.
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