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Can​ç​ons per a un lent retard

by Ferran Fages

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    Released on cd by Etude Records on 2007, still there's a few amount of available copies.

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    Get all 11 Ferran Fages releases available on Bandcamp and save 50%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of LIFE BEST UNDER YOUR SEAT REVISITED#1, For John Ayrton Paris, Llavi vell, Llum moll, Isòbara #1, Lullaby for Lali, For Pau Torres, Pèl Nord, and 3 more. , and , .

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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Paraula clau 17:36
7.
8.
Gir lent 05:11
9.
Retall llarg 06:06

about

"The impulse to compose this music has been to accompany the slow decay of my father's life... one way of expressing the anguish and emptiness of seeing and living a life slip away. His death came one month later after the recording." -Ferran Fages (2007)

"CANÇONS PER A UN LENT RETARD, Ferran´s second guitar album stands a-parallel to the first (a cavall entre dos cavalls). 9 songs or cançons that reveal (give us access to) the becoming of a song, opposed to today's platitude of objective and/or subjective song-writing... Ferran´s objective. They are song(ing)s just because they intent to produce meaning... a music reality is aimed at and diagrammatically consists of a multitude of horizontal and vertical lines. Lines opposed to plotting points. Possibilities of possibilities. Guitar compositions curving time with suspense, delay, slower or faster remnants. We are confronted with intensity "colored" with dense and resistant materiality and aggressiveness... and it is not pure materiality. The musical event is immanentized by a death operation. The Imminent death of a close person, totally unpredictable, was constantly interrupting or (not) the process of synthesis, retroactively forming the songs by assuming and distorting their materiality. The emotional and predetermined character of this operation dissolves through the insistent and continuous listening of the cançons, thus it seems that the songs' time can truly exist outside Ferran´s emotional temporality (that´s why they ARE songs). The conjunction and interconnections of these autonomous musical events, that coexist in many levels, produces refrains, small melodies, and many other different figures...In short, Ferran designates a "new" musical timeplace where improvisation and composition are open from being open-form or aleatoric, a destinerrance where something eventually must happen, something beyond calculation and labor, not negating death, but something coming from the other, who is any-particular song listener." -Michalis Kyratsous (July 2007)


Though Fages takes pains to assert that the present album is not a posthumous homage to his father, who died a month after the recording was concluded,
and also dedicated it to his father’s caretaker, the music was clearly intended as a reaction to and an observation of what he refers to as “the slow decay of
my father’s life”. I take it that it’s safe to translate the title as, “songs for a slow demise”.
I suppose it’s a natural tendency in such situations to create work which might be more accommodating to the person involved, in the case of more abstract-oriented artists, to turn toward more traditional and emotionally evocative formats. Jason Lescalleet, whose magnificent release from last year one can hardly help but recall, included his daughter singing “Molly Malone” and structured his noise-filled tape manipulations into a near programmatic summation of his loss and acceptance. While I’m certainly not familiar with everything Fages has committed to disc (I don’t know his earlier solo recording “a cavall entre dos cavalls”), the pieces on “cançons per a un lent retard” are far more overtly emotional in a traditional sense than anything I’ve previously heard from him, though they’re resolutely clear-eyed and unflinching. It’s some pretty great music. Though one could easily note the almost mandatory sonic indebtedness to Bailey, Fages (on acoustic guitar throughout) is generally more consonant in approach but no less incisive. Sometimes, as near the beginning of the lengthy “suspense horizontal”, there are clear precedents in “opposite”-era Sugimoto. If anything, however, I found myself thinking of Loren Connors, though minus the blues saturation, substituting instead a Spanish melancholy with tinges of flamenco (occasionally quite clear as in the central portion of: "tangent al dit” or much of “gir lent”). On “paraula clau”, Fages, otherwise heard solo, performs an intriguing duet with Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga who is responsible for detuning the guitar on the run, as it were, resulting in a haunting, bleak series of wavering moans, buzzes and taps. Fages tends to stay in the mid to lower range of the guitar, playing harshly plucked single notes against vast, abyssal chords that swallow them whole.
The technical and influential aspects are really secondary, though. The music here is extraordinary, often brutally so. Fages opens himself to the experience of a loved one’s deterioration, neither glancing away in “good taste” or reluctance to face reality nor ignoring the enormous emotional price it’s exacting on him. No pathos, just hard-edged sorrow. When he closes the disc with “retall llarg”, using perhaps something like an e-bow on the strings to generate layers of morose drones before merging into a slow cascade of dolorous notes, there’s a sense of true exhaustion. It’s not pretty or hopeful, just very true. -Brian Olewnick (Bagatellen, 2007)

credits

released February 28, 2021

"Cançons per a un lent retard" was originally relased on Etude Records (2007) by Pau Torres.

Ferran Fages: acoustic guitar
Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga: detunings on track 6

All tracks composed by Ferran Fages except track 6 (Paraula Clau) composed by Ferran Fages and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga

Recorded, mixed and mastered by Ferran Conangla between December 2006 and February 2007
Sleeve picture: "Orphan, 2002" by Roger Ballen. Used with permission of the artist
Desgin by Atipus

Remastered by Marcel·lí Bayer (february 2021)
Thanks to Lali Barrière and Pau Torres

Last but not least, this release is Dimitra's first recording.

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about

Ferran Fages Barcelona, Spain

Ferran Fages is an improviser and composer from Barcelona, Spain.

This BC is planned to offer reissues of old/out of stock recordings.

www.ferranfages.net

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