Unfolding by Kurt Buttigieg

Kurt Buttigieg is an occasional artist and unwavering bricoleur from Malta, based in Brussels, Belgium.

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"The building blocks of this release are repurposed vinyl, hand-spooled tape, slowed-down microcassettes and field recordings on different media.

Unfolding is my first proper solo album in about a decade. I wasn't particularly compelled to release anything. I kept making field recordings and collecting 'useful' records for years, without going back to them. Eventually, I sat down and started listening through.

The inevitable followed. I started cutting, altering and weaving the sounds together: sine waves from a test record were transformed into drones that cleaned the dust off my speakers, the recorded pendulum of a grandfather clock tuned into another rhythm, water sounds from a television library record (previously belonging to the Belgian state broadcaster and picked up at a jumble sale) all found their place in the mix.

Every sound effortlessly suggested another. Time looped to time, backwards.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it and, especially, as much as it enjoyed making itself".

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REVIEW FROM VITAL WEEKLY, ISSUE 1272:

"One of the saving graces of lockdown is that people are at home. They have time on their hands, and they are getting creative. This is resulting in an explosion of new releases and labels. One new label that is really exciting to me is Complex Holiday. Run by Kurt Buttigieg and Robert Farrugia they have so far put out four cassettes and a 12” since June 2020. The first two releases were strong. Ayn II Widen’s ‘How to Remain in Perpetual Contact with Your Surroundings’ was a piece of wonderful ambient electroacoustic experimental pop and Robert Farrugia’s ‘Worn’ was filled with a glorious drone after drone. While all the releases created independently of each other, they all exhibit similar motifs and themes. Their forays into sound collage, drone and musique concrete and help to create the labels voice.

While listening to Complex Holiday’s recent releases I am taken away to worlds with lurid landscapes. There is a wonderful woozy sway to ‘Confiance en Toi’, on Kurt Buttigieg’s ‘Unfolding’. The outro feels like a mixture of feedback, static and white noise. It is a fitting end to a song that is brought to mind what Woking looks like after the red weed has taken over in HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’. It is utterly enchanting but there is a feeling of unease that creeps up your neck from the moment it starts and never quite leaves you. It’s wonderful.

If ‘Unfolding’ was about taking you out of reality, then ‘Morbig’ by Guilhem All and ‘The Interior’ by Peter Sant are all about keeping you grounded with sounds you know but can’t quite place. The opening of ‘Gimmie Amen’ sounds like vinyl crackling. Or is that a fire burning, clock cogs moving, or plastic being crunched up, either way, it gets your attention from the offset. As ‘Gimmie Amen’ progresses rhythmic beats, for want of a better term, appear. As they become more pronounced the song moves into a techno loop. We’re not talking a big room banger here, more of minimal lo-fi fare. It works incredibly well. There are massive choral sounding pieces that come from nowhere and vanish almost as soon as they’ve begun, this gives the song a strangely religious vibe, but given the name, this isn’t that surprising. What is surprising is how playable ‘Gimmie Amen’ is. It flies joyously out of the speakers. Two-thirds of the way through the motifs from the opening is repeated. This gives the song the feeling of a never-ending round. ‘The Interior’ opens with a hiss of the faint sound of traffic. A slowly the sound of birds starts to appear. Pigeons, chickens, parrots, and other avian noises start to fly from the speakers. As ‘Scene One’ progresses the birdsong gets more frantic and reaches a crescendo before gently fading out. ‘Dust on the Ivories’ is effectively one elegant drone. It starts of serene but as it goes on it becomes more aggressive until a minute from the end it reaches a peak and just stays there.

What makes these releases, and the previous two, so exciting is the mystery to them. What are these field recordings of? Where were they recorded and why? As there are no defined answers it is let to us, the listener, to try and piece it all together. This is where the enjoyment comes from. You hear a noise, and it reminds you of an old flat you lived in around 2006. A moment later there is a deep bassline that skews into an operatic section that reminds you of going to church as a child. But the soundscapes are abstract and it’s hard to come to conclusions that justify their brilliance. These releases show that Complex Holiday has a very bright future as long as it continues to release forward-thinking music like this. The complexity of the compositions is fantastic, as is the musician’s ability to make them incredibly captivating and playable." -- Nick Roseblade, Vital Weekly

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Kurt Buttigieg’s "Unfolding" is an album of mnemonic undulations.

In Confiance en Quoi, Buttigieg creates “a well of time” where notes akin to the classic sounds of the midnight hour result into a synaesthetic sonic experience, creating, in my mind, an image a clock under the waters of a well; an auditory manifestation of when time is comfortably sluggish for whoever perceives it, complemented by a tinge of classic foreboding. The sonic object then becomes tethered and sheds its liquidity in favour of a “half-loop” as the track shifts. This sonic embodiment of kronos, ringing to a half-point, being caught halfway in a loop becomes an experience commenced but which is denied a conclusion to the listener.

In this sense, we see the creation of a sound-maker who is acutely aware of psychological space, where time becomes a state of matter as it shifts from a chamber-like fluidity to flashing solidity. -- Christian Siciliano


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Itinerant label for inside-out ambient and sound art tomfoolery.

Postage and demo info, see website.

Founded in ∞ 2020. Anchored in Valletta, Malta.

Run by Kurt Buttigieg and Robert Farrugia.

complexholiday.com
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