Except for some drones from the northern shores and a crackling keyboard lullaby, flickers of hope for a quick return to music released through his Soundcloud account, we didn't hear much from Leonardo Rosado the last couple of years. However, half a decade had been enough for the Portuguese ambient artist, who left the habour warmth of Lisbon for the cold of another port, Göteborg, half a dozen years ago already, to showcase his talent for sensitive and fragile soundscapes of electro-acoustic textures washed away by the tides of time.
Leonardo has been quite an important musician for me, one of my gateways to self-released modern ambient through his self-managed labels Heart And Soul and FeedbackLoop, putting out music from the likes of Gimu, Witxes, Monolyth & Cobalt, Pascal Savy, Porya Hatami & Darren Harper... and he made me come across the ghostly soundcapes and etheral vocal harmonies of Birds of Passage, who could have made this list as well.
The pulsating and eerie Dear and Unfamiliar, recorded with the New-Zealand winter lady and published by Denovali is thus one of my personal favourite along with the chiaroscuro masterpiece Opaque Glitter, the low-frequency piano/hiss melancholy of The Blue Nature Of Everyday, the reverberated, flickering, frosty recollections of Washed Away Memories and of course, probably his greatest work to date : Adrift, whose frozen soundtracks of displacement recall delicate streams of blurry impressions and subconscious feelings.
His latest album, featuring Aaron Martin (From the Mouth of the Sun) on afflicted and haunting cello lines, is also a must-have. And of course there is this murky jewel, exclusive track offered to IRM's Ashes compilation six years ago, a thick tidal wave of droning textures which still makes me hope to witness Leonardo Rosado wander someday into darker and noisier sonic territories :
No comments:
Post a Comment