Sei Miguel - Ra Clock
(Headlights)
Sei Miguel's last disc on Headlights, Still Alive in Barrio Alto, was a live performance by a seven-piece band, a disc that never really seemed to find its stride or pull things together. Ra Clock, however, finds the Lisbon native Miguel in more varied settings, both live and in studio, with different performers, and the results are much more interesting and appealing.
The disc's first piece, "The Metal Flower" is a duet between Miguel (on "noon" and "evening" trumpets) and César Burago (who plays the gong). Rarely is Burago's gong allowed to ring freely, instead he deals in minute clangs and brushes, eliciting a quiet array of metallic whispers upon which Miguel improvises with terse, twisted pretzels of trumpet and soft, moody tones. Miguel stays quiet much of the time, however, and gives Burago plenty of time for solo exploration.
"Asterion," an almost twenty-minute quartet piece, begins with the sounds of Monsieur Trinité's African clay drum, whose hollow, vowel-y timbre gives the music a non-Western influence that helps the rest of the group immensely. Miguel and Fala Mariam play trumpet and trombone, respectively, and are most effective when tempering long whines over the clay drum; when they begin to make smaller statements with their instruments, some of the piece's magic is lost. Paulinho Russolo adds the almost inaudible drones of a Hammond organ, providing a solid backdrop for the other musicians' improvisations.
The third track, "étude for aterion," is Miguel on solo piano, playing a slow series of repetitions on a basic theme. Chords and note clusters at the lower end of the keyboard are struck, then adorned with single notes from the higher keys. The lo-fi recording renders Miguel almost silent for much of the track, and this étude doesn't compare to the live track that precedes it. The short recording of water that makes up "Isobel" seems needlessly tacked on as Ra Clock's next selection.
"Ra Clock" ends the album of the same name with eighteen minutes of music recorded live in someone's apartment, and the six-piece improvisation is the most reminiscent of Miguel's last disc of any of Ra Clock's tracks. Burago is back on gong, Trinité plays percussion, Miriam adds trombone, and the line-up is rounded out by Miguel and other frequent collaborators of his, bassist Margarida Garcia and guitarist Manuel Mota. Burago's gong and Trinité's metallic percussion implements keep inconsistent time, finding steady and slow rhythms, then abandoning them completely, while Garcia's bass steps erratically in front of these short-lived rhythms. The members of the ensemble take turns playing in what sound like duos or trios, so though the main qualities of the piece, namely its low volume and copious allowances for silence, are usually present, each section of the piece has its own distinct sound.
It's odd that Ra Clock features many of the same musicians as Sei Miguel's last disc, but finds better results. For the most part, the modus operandi of Miguel's music is the same, but there's a more coherent feel to the disc, a sense of purpose and an adherence to some sort of understood structure within the improv, and it's this coherence that puts Miguel's music into a much better light.
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