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Ferran Fages (Spain, 1974) specializes in
improvised music for guitar, turntables and electronics,
and has worked in the groups
Error Focus (since 1998 with Ruth Barberan) and Cremaster
(since 2000 with Alfredo Costa Monteiro), that released
Flysch (G3G Records, 2002),
Infra (Antifrost, 2003) and
23 November 2002 (Sound 323, 2003).
Fages expressed his aesthetic ideals on
A Cavall Entre Dos Cavalls (Creative Sources, 2004)
and Cancons Per a un Lent Retard (Etude, 2007), two albums of
subliminal dissonant studies for solo guitar.
The latter includes
the nine-minute Suspens Vertical, a "song" deconstructed as a minimal soundscape,
the sixteen-minute Suspens Horitzontal, which is relatively lively by
his standards with the plucking becoming almost hysterical,
the seventeen-minute Paraula Clau,
that juxtaposes barely-audible
tinkling and droning sounds with vehemently percussive sounds.
All of them share a very fractured structure and slow-paced timing. They
advanced tone by tone, emphasizing the silence in between the tones.
This makes each tone richer and more significant than it would be in a
continuum. Fages' art is a close relative of
Taku Sugimoto.
Cinabri (Absurd, 2005) was a collaboration with Will Guthrie.
Since 2000 Fages also worked with Alfredo Costa Monteiro
in an electro-acoustic duo called Cremaster, documented on
Oompfsquawk (2001),
Flysch (2002),
Infra (2003),
32, 41 n/m2 (2003),
and Audiobot (2006), a collaboration with Mattin.
The trio of Fages, Monteiro and
Ruth Barberan recorded Atolon (2003) and Istmo (2005). This trio plus Margarida Garcia
recorded Octante (2005).
The solo guitar album
Al Voltant D'Un Para/.Lel (jan 2007 - Etude, 2008) contains
the 13-minute Primer Gir
(whose slowly unfolding and tinning guitar tones indirectly focus the listener's
attention on the droning space between the notes)
and
the 11-minute Ultim Gir (a much more organic piece that sounds like a deconstructed bluesy saudade ballad).
Some of the pieces revisit themes from A Cavall Entre Dos Cavalls.
Lullaby for Lali (Etude, 2010) is a collaboration with
Lali Barrière (guitaret, metallophone and electronics) that consists
of Lullaby Electric and Lullaby Acoustic.
On Llavi Vell (L'Innomable, 2011) Ferran Fages plays acoustic guitar and works with contact microphones and speakers. «The nature of this recording is a distorted image that came to my mind during the composition of the piece. I worked on Llavi vell during 3 months from july to september 2010. The sound is the result of bowing the strings of the guitar in different fret positions, with a bow made of a long metapiece. The fret positions were related to the different divisions of the lenght of the strings: half, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. The multilayered composition allows to create a fluid mass with two levels of sound. The first one is a huge mass, almost a drone; but the movement of the bow breaks the illusion of a constant and fluid sound. The second one is a collection of dispersed harmonics, treated as a melodic pattern. The final part of the piece is an epilogue of this melodic pattern. It's built in different layers of feedback, created from short and repetitive movements of a contact mic on a spring, placed on the surface of a flat speaker».
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