Urbano Mistica Amplitude
Gato Leiras : sampler, notebook / Michael Renkel : notebook FX processor
photo by M. Renkel
2:13 music is an improvisers' collective run from London by John Bissett with outposts in Athens and Berlin. On "Urbano Mistica Amplitude" Michael Renkel forsakes his acoustic guitar and is joined on samplers and effects by Berlin-based Argentinian Gato Leiras. Whether the three (untitled) tracks on offer are fully or partially improvised is hard to determine, but they are well-crafted and impressive demonstrations of what computers can do in the hands of sensitive musicians. The music has more in common with leftfield electronica practitioners such as Leafcutter John and Pimmon than it does with the stripped-down post-industrial minimalism of the Berlin-based Phosphor collective, in which Renkel plays with, amongst others, Axel Dörner, Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann. The blips, glitches and tangential references to techno belong to the city (hence "Urbano") as does the blurred traffic photo that forms the album cover, but the overall effect is satisfyingly spacious and nebulous (hence the "Mistica").
Dan Warburton All Music Guide
Three long tracks performed live - collaborations between Renkel and Gato Leiras from Buenos Aires. The live recording is an important element to this exciting release; the listener is invited to take part in a form of "instant composition" , which has propably been the dream of all improvising and free musicians since AMM onwards. A much busier and intensive set than the CD above, including bundles of samples, live processing and continually reinvented electric gurglery, whizzmation, and bloopage. The voice samples are particularly juicy ; the vocoder has never been used with such imagination. It's like being in the midst of a crowd of babbling aliens, their tongues stretched, slowed down and distorted, all bubbling like melted cheese above a chaotic muddle of noisy rubble. Urbano Mistica Amplitude is a form of electronic crowd control; onla on occasion does it veer towards wackiness, as though the two heads of the collaborators had grown thick with the very insanity they are attempting to reproduce in music
Sound Projector Ed Pinsent