Freiband/Boca Raton - Product

Crónica is proud to present the fifth installment in the Product series with works by Freiband and Boca Raton. Freiband's "Replay" and Boca Raton's "Crop." are a pair of superb live-recordings made on March 25th 2004 at the Muziekcentrum as part of the Earational 2004 festival for electronic music and audio-art, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. Early 2004 Freiband was invited by the Earational festival to play a new piece based on the first CD 'Microbes'. When that was released everybody thought this to be the 'first laptop album' by Frans de Waard, but in fact it's the last 'non laptop album'. In the early days of Freiband, concerts were loosely based on sounds from the 'Microbes' album, played from mini discs and CDRs. To take the album onto the laptop was indeed a challenge, but in hindsight it proved to be the best concert by Freiband ever. Taking the small detailed micro-sounds, placing them in a new context add a lot of tension and new depths to the original material. Boca Raton's piece performed at Earational 2004 is the result of a series of experiments on Quadraphony and composing along it's six axes. On micro, meso and macro-level, the composition contains circulating or propelling sound, both in it's wave-shape as in it's structure over time.



A split disc between a favorite band of mine, Freiband, and another band I have never heard of, Boca Raton. Freiband is in good form from this live show(called Earational, of all things...) with minimal glitches and building waves of pops and clicks - very surgical and precise. This release has quite a bit going on for them, the sound is a little more full than their usual. Boca Raton is even sparser. spooky washes of pleasant hissiness, sounds alot like the drone based Coil. Very nicely done. Other tracks have a little more energy, as if the hissing hose was turned up and it is flailing all over the place. A very pleasant track has the ambience of birds chirping outside as other incredibly subtle noises and buzzes occur. As for seeing it live, it might have been a little slow, but for listening at home this stuff is quite impressive.(Don Poe)

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