CD, six-panel digipak. Recorded, mixed and mastered in Lisbon across August and September 1999. David Maranha on violin, João Lopes on double bass and bass drum, Manuel Mota on guitar, Patricia Machás on harmonium and Simão Varela on Hammond organ.
Maranha comes out of the same line as Paul Panhuysen and Arnold Dreyblatt, both of whom appear elsewhere in this selection, and shares their attention to timbre ahead of structure. He has worked with glass harmonica, with didgeridoo, and with an instrument of his own making called the maranhophone. What separates him from the more conceptual end of minimalism is that his method is practical: he sets a texture going and lets the sounds show what they are, instead of imposing a system on them.
That is also what makes the record difficult. The instrumentation above produces something scratchy and tightly woven, and several pieces sit on an edge that never resolves. Brian Duguid, writing in The Wire, called the timbre steel wool and admitted that much of it will set the nerves jangling before the ear adjusts. He also observed, accurately, that these compositions tend to establish a texture and leave it running, with less direction than Maranha's earlier records.
Underneath the shrillness the material is dense, and the harmonium and the Hammond hold everything on a drone that neither resolves nor stops. Duguid ended by calling it rich and complex, and beautiful in its odd way.
Maranha belongs to the same minimalist tradition as Paul Panhuysen and Arnold Dreyblatt. It is serious, deeply careful stuff (as anyone who has seen one of Maranha’s complex scores will attest), but informed throughout with a sense of practical experiment and discovery rather than the austere conceptualism or mathematical certainty that certain other minimalists adhere to. Like Panhuysen and Dreyblatt, Maranha pays a great deal of attention to instrumental timbre - he’s used the glass harmonica, didgeridoo and his own ‘maranhophone’ in the past – and his music is as much na opportunity for the sounds to illustrate their own character as it is for him to impose his own structure.
Circunscrita’s instrumentation (violin, double bass, bass drum, harmonium, Hammond organ and guitar) provides a steel wool, scratchily woven timbre. Many of the pieces have na on-edge texture that defies easy listening, the sort of unpleasant, teeth-grinding screech that more polite minimalists leave well alone. Initially, much of it is likely to set nerves jangling, and it may take a while to adjust to the music’s fairly unwelcoming vision. It can also be argued that these compositions generally just set up a texture and leave it to run – there’s less in the way of direction here than on previous Maranha recordings.
For my part, I’m just glad that Maranha has Kept at it for the last decade – the world needs more like him, finding idiosyncratic new sounds in old genres. It may be shrill at times, but Circunscrita is also rich and complex, perhaps even beautiful in its odd way. At its best, it has a poignant, tender edge that deserves to be treasured ---- The Wire (Brian Duguid)
