Juan Matos Capote
Umbra
CD (E133)

"Umbra was recorded in 2010 in Barcelona. I used a modified
AM radio and a home-made oscillator. I found the radio in the
street the previous year, discarded outside a huge warehouse
full of electronic ‘garbage’. I took it to my studio and modified
it using circuit-bending techniques.

Umbra is comprised of ten short pieces. In most of them I
played only the modified AM radio, in others just the oscillator,
and in some both.”

Juan Matos Capote is an artist from the Canary Islands living
in Barcelona. He was academically trained as a visual artist,
and soon began to incorporate onomatopoeias within his paint-
ings and sculptures which dealt mainly with perception. Later
on he began to work with sound, building his own devices,
generators and registers. Nowadays his work combines both
interests. In his performances, he makes use of analogue
equipment such as home-made oscillators, circuit-bent toys,
radios, hydrophones and other modified electronic devices.
Many of his circuits are characterised by random, yet control-
lable, behaviours.

Mastered by Álex Gámez

juanmatoscapote.net
circuitbendingbcn.com

First edition of 200 copies






The music here has a very elemental, raw feeling, about
as far from the polish of the contemporary mainstream as
you could possibly get. Capote has taken AM radios, plus
an oscillator he has constructed himself, and by inserting
fingers and other items into the circuitry has developed
a quite remarkable way of shaping the output of these
seemingly wild and uncontrollable tools to create music.
Entirely to his credit, Capote, on this release, makes no
attempt to bury his sounds behind other elements, and
places this wildly difficult to constrain set of sounds right
in the foreground alone, with nothing else to distract
you. So we hear scratchy, searing blasts of sound, bare
and unadorned, wild scribbling, detuned abstraction
and nothing else. There is no sense of layering, just the
immediate sounds left exposed to be taken in.
More...

Richard Pinnell at The Watchful Ear
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