Description: Cría Cuervos is the music project of italian sound artist Eugenio Maggi. Influenced by surrealism, minimalism, Drone and Industrial music, Hard Core/Punk and Grind, his music has evolved from more noisy experiments and now sits somewhere in between darker ambience and electroacoustic. During the years he created several full-lenght solo works and also collaborated with artist such as Paul Bradley, Sparkle in Grey, Ninth Desert and Maurizio Bianchi. His music was released on many international labels: Immanence, Thisco, Mystery Sea, Taalem, Twenty Hertz and Dielectric Records. "Vor Feuerschlünden" (...German for "Before Throats of Fire"...) is Cría Cuervos's latest full-lenght offering and it probably is his best solo work to date. The album features two long tracks of electroacoustic / experimental nature, built using field recordings (...cicadas, gas, frogs, water...), self-programmed Theta waves, short waves and softwares. No synthesizers were used during the recording process. The title track really blown up our minds when we listened to it for the first time, and it still manages to obtain the same result one year later, even after repeated listenings. It fades in very quietly with reverbered noises which build up a solid high-pitched drone that is later paired with colonies of chirping insects. Low rumbles are also introduced until the different parts slowly fill the whole audio spectrum without leaving any frequency unexplored. With "Vor Feuerschlünden" Cría Cuervos successfully creates a sort of wall of concrète noise whose peak is reached around the fifteenth minute; then the chirping hell slowly comes to an end. "Blutgebell" is another twentyseven minutes opus that we can ideally divide in two separate movements. It begins with the sound of croaking frogs that get more and more excited as an underwater drone slowly emerges from the bottom of their small pond. Moving from the background to the foreground, more disquieting layers of ambience and other concrète sound sources are added to the mix. Theta waves replace all these elements as they slowly fade out. They take us through the whole second movement as their shifting tones also introduce recordings of short waves radio and the sound of running water, before coming to an end. More Cría Cuervos solo and collaborative works are going to be released soon by other labels in Europe. Along with "Vor Feuerschlünden" they are surely going to bring him the recognition he deserves.
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