REVIEWS
• Vital Weekly, number 1064, week 1 (2016), review by Frans de Waard.
Here we don’t have a CD of the best known songs by Christof Migone (for what would they be?) but another fine example of his conceptual approach to music; he made a CD with the cracking of knuckles, knees and wrists (Vital Weekly 293) and farts (Vital Weekly 389). On this new release the microphone plays the main role. There are three pieces here, ‘Hit Parade’ (in itself twelve separate parts), ‘Microfall’ (three parts) and ‘Microhole’ (two parts). In ‘Hit Parade’ Migone presents live recordings of this piece, which is about a number of participants (ten to twenty) who lie on the floor, face down and hit the floor, or pavement when performed outside, 1000 times in their own tempo, with a microphone, which is amplified; sometimes with a bit of changes. The website has a detailed description of each of the recording in different towns. Sometimes the music piece ‘before and after’, such as ‘Milan’, or feedback (‘Seoul’), or mixes by other people. It makes that these twelve pieces sound quite different from each other. There is indeed the hitting of microphones, but sometimes also capturing the street sounds, rain or whatever else is going inside. None of these pieces, I would think, is the complete recording of a single concert, but rather snapshots of these concerts, and it is in that brevity that this works really well. In ‘Microfall’ he records the sound of a microphone falling down on the floor, amplified and repeats that until the microphone is destroyed. There is a separate piece with all the 87 falls and a piece with the rumbling in between the falls, a most curious piece of microphone cable hum. In ‘Microhole’ Migone uses a microphone to make a hole in the wall, a recording of which is edited here down to a piece of music of six minutes, whereas the original last nineteen minutes. Now, one could think this is all either a joke or conceptual art, and surely the last is not far off the mark, I would think, but purely in terms of music I think this is a most listenable release. I mean, besides the conceptual nature of the music, this is also something that can be enjoyed in terms of music. Migone has a great ear for finding the most interesting bits and pieces from his recordings, and puts them in an order that ensures the most optimum listening pleasure. This is in pure musical terms a great release, even if you have very little idea about the concept behind the pieces. Maybe that was the reason that the cover holds very little information in that respect?
