Joana Gama & Luís Fernandes - At The Still Point Of The Turning World [Room 40 - 2018]At The Still Point Of The Turning World shifts between slurred elegance, simmering uneasy, and churning malevolence. The six-track album brings together mostly unbalanced layers of strings, percussion and horn work- all to create a dramatic, but often hazed-out record that sits somewhere between dense neo- classical collaging & grand modern composition, with fleeting moments of off-kilter ambience. The work was originally Commissioned in 2017 by Câmara Municipal de Guimarães and A Oficina / Westway Lab Festival. And sees the pairing of Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes utilizing a blend of piano, manipulated orchestration samples ,and electronics- to create the rather unpredictable record- that in any of the six tracks can shift from grand & rising elegance, to blurred washers of instrumental textures, through to expanse of jittering electronics darted by dramatically spaced piano hacks, and beyond
At times the pair very much push the structure & harmonic logic of the tracks, and from time-to-time, this does come off as a little smug & contrived. But thankfully things often do resolve either in a gloriously off-angled crescendo, or a sudden moody pair back. The album comes in at the fairly short run-time of thirty-seven minutes, and really that’s the perfect length for this type of record- as ideas don’t outstay their welcome or become over-stretched, and the feel of hazed-out to muddle grandness never becomes too cloying or overplayed.
If you have a penchant for where elegance & chaos meets I reckon you’ll be interested in what Gama & Fernandes are trying to do At the Still Point of the Turning World- it’s not always wholly successful, but there’s enough here that is to make this worth checking out.    Roger Batty
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