Michael Begg ‘Sonambulo’ CD *REDUCED PRICE!* ICR DISTRIBUTION

*REDUCED PRICE!*
Sonambulo documents the work and performance completed during a residency at the Centro Mexicano para la Musica y las Artes Sonoras in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico during November and December 2018: Sonambulo:  un bebedero para pájaros compuesto por dientes para la novia del viento. (Sleepwalker: A birdbath made of teeth for the Bride of the Wind)

The residency was developed as part of Seeing Hearing UK Mexico, a three-year collaboration between the UK and Mexico made possible with the support of Anglo Arts the cultural department of The Anglo Mexican Foundation A.C; British Council Mexico, CMMAS and Cryptic.

Sonambulo’s central subject is Leonora Carrington, the British painter closely aligned to the Surrealist movement who settled in Mexico soon after the Second World War.  There, Carrington’s alchemical, visionary work made her a household name. The people of Mexico accorded her a degree of admiration and respect only now starting to be echoed in her native Britain.

Michael Begg “Through meditation, and surrealist techniques including free-association, automatic writing, juxtaposition and pursuing the logic of dreams, I endeavoured to place myself at the alchemical table of Leonora, surrounded by moths, and steam, whilst impossible beasts, hags, witches, sooth-sayers, mutated archetypes and psychic golems ebb and flow through walls and shadows.“
Official release date : November 4th, shipping now.

Review by Frans De Waard in Vital Weekly : Late last year saw Michael Begg, UK’s ambient composer in a residency project at the Centro Mexicano para la Musica y las Artes Sonoras in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico. His work is about “Leonora Carrington, the British painter closely aligned to the Surrealist movement who settled in Mexico soon after the Second World War. There, Carrington’s alchemical, visionary work made
her a household name. The people of Mexico accorded her a degree of admiration and respect only now starting to be echoed in her native Britain”, about whom I had not heard before, and I had to Google her work. It is some strong work indeed and Begg creates music that is perhaps not as full of strange images, beasts and witches, but it does capture a weird atmosphere that
works quite well with Carrington’s paintings. It is, so I think, not a one on one translation of the paintings, or a soundtrack to that, but rather an interpretation of the atmospheres captures in the paintings. It is about darkness, spooky surroundings, nocturnal wanderings in dark places. I think. Begg’s music is spacious, synthesizer like (did he bring a bunch to Mexico; Did they have some
over there? Or is it all laptop-based?), expansive and with a fine touch of experimentalism. His trademark sound of water glass sounds, higher-pitched frequencies appear here again. When he uses ‘other’ sounds they are voices from a mass in a church (such as in ‘Morelia Cathedral’), obscured field recordings, such as the percussive sounds of ‘Plain Chant’, along with what
seems screen wipers. It is the addition of these sounds that add that surrealist touch to the already haunting music. It is then in a place I like Begg at his best; it’s ambient, it is spooky and it is narrative. It is a combination of many things I like in music and Begg does a great job here, and that’s what we are used from him. This CD is limited to 150 copies, so be quick.