1- Suspens vertical (9:31)
2- Més ràpid que l´ull (3:26)
3- Tanget al dit (3:54) <<-Listening [mp3]
4- L´ombre del dit (7:08) 
5- Suspens horitzontal (16:08)
6- Paraula clau (17:39)
7- El retard del mirall (2:29)
8- Gir lent (5:15)
9- Retard llarg (6:05)

Ferran Fages: Acoustic guitar
Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga: Detuning on track 6.

Etude Records is proud to release "Cançons per a un lent retard" by Catalan composer Ferran Fages.
71 minutes of acoustic guitar divided into 9 tracks full of solitude and hopeness. -E.R.


"The impulse to compose this music has been to accompany the slow decay of my father´s life...
one way of expressing the anguish and emptiness of seeing and living a life slip away.
His death came one month after the recording." -Ferran Fages

"Cançons per a un lent retard, Ferran´s second guitar album stands a-parallel to the first
(a cavall entre dos cavalls). 9 songs or cançons that reveal (give us access to) the becoming of a song,
opposed to today's platitude of objective and/or subjective song-writing... Ferran´s objective.
They are song(ing)s just because they intent to produce meaning... a music reality is aimed at and 
diagrammatically consists of a multitude of horizontal and vertical lines. Lines opposed to plotting points. 
Possibilities of possibilities. Guitar compositions curving time with suspense, delay, slower or faster remnants. 
We are confronted with intensity "colored" with dense and resistant materiality and aggressiveness... 
and it is not pure materiality. The musical event is immanentized by a death operation. The Imminent death 
of a close person, totally unpredictable, was constantly interrupting or (not) the process of synthesis, 
retroactively forming the songs by assuming and distorting their materiality. The emotional and predetermined 
character of this operation dissolves through the insistent and continuous listening of the cançons, thus it seems that  
the songs' time can truly exist outside Ferran´s emotional temporality (that´s why they ARE songs).  
The conjunction and interconnections of these autonomous musical events, that coexist in  
many levels, produces refrains, small melodies, and many other different figures...In short, Ferran designates a 
"new" musical timeplace where improvisation and composition are open from being open-form or aleatoric, a 
destinerrance where something eventually must happen, something beyond calculation and labor, not negating 
death, but something coming from the other, who is any-particular song listener." -Michalis Kyratsous (July 2007)


It is not a posthumous homage.

Ferran Fages plays guitar, turntables and electronics.He lives and works in Barcelona (Spain).
He was member of the collective IBA from 1999 to 2006. He plays regulary in different improvisation projects like: 
.CREMASTER (with Alfredo Costa Monteiro). 
.Fages-Barberán-Costa Monteiro trio
.Fages-Gross-Guthrie trio
.Fages-Gross-Möslang trio
.FAGUS (with Pascal Battus)
.Rega-Fages duo
He did different collaborations with the choreographers and dancers: Olga Mesa, Carme Torrent and Constanza Brncic. 
He's played with Mattin, Margarida García, Ivan Palacky, Manuel Mota, Xavier Charles, Francisco López, Thomas Chamertant, 
Andrea Neumann, Taku Unami, Masahiko Okura, Masafumi Ezaki, Bukhard Beins, Ingar Zach, Guiseppe Ielasi, Mark Wastell.... 
among others.Also he works in his own compositons for guitar. As a guitarist he normally plays solo, but he has played 
with Derek Bailey, Pablo Rega, Phil Niblock and Rhys Chatham. 
He has played in different festivals and venues such as: Nits de la Fundació Miró, Sonar, OFFF and LEM (Barcelona), Sonicscope (Lisbon), 
Ertz (Bera),Cruce, Auditorio Nacional Reina Sofia and La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Arteleku (Donosti), Sound 323 and LMC festival (London), 
Instants Chavirés and Les Voutes (Paris), Off-site (Tokyo), A4 (Bratislava), Cave 12 (Geneva), Music Lover’s Field Companion 2007 (Newcastle)

He also is active in poetry.  

LINKS: .http://www.cremaster.info
            .http://www.linnomable.com
            .http://www.etuderecords.com

DISCOGRAPHY:

2001

- CREMASTER“Oomfsquawk”(auto-edition)

2002

- CREMASTER “Flysch”(G3G Records)

- COMPILATION“I've never thought you would had done it…”  (Rossbin)

- FERRAN FAGES and MARGARIDA GARCIA “Sloworthography”, (Thin Ice) 

2003

- CREMASTER “Infra”(Antifrost) 

- CREMASTER “23 november 2002”(Sound 323) 

- CREMASTER “32,41 n/m2”(absurd)

- CREMASTER : Compilation "void" (Antifrost)

2004

- FERRAN FAGES“A cavall entre dos cavalls (composicions per a guitarra)”(Creative Sources)

- RUTH BARBERÁN, FERRAN FAGES, ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO “Atolón” (Rossbin)

2005

- RUTH BARBERÁN, FERRAN FAGES, ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO, MARGARIDA GARCIA  “Octante”(l’innomable)

- RUTH BARBERÁN, FERRAN FAGES, ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO “Istmo”(Creative Sources)

2006

- MATTIN + CREMASTER "Barcelona" (Audiobot)

- RUTH BARBERÁN, FERRAN FAGES, ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO “Semisferi”(Esquilo)

- FERRAN FAGES, JEAN-PHILIPPE GROSS, WILL GUTHRIE “Fages-Gross-Guthrie” (Antboy/Lmc Members)

- FAGES-GUTHRIE“Cinabri”(absurd)

- FAGUS “Dans l'involucre entre ouvert”  (a question of re entry)

- FRANCISCO LOPEZ'S “absolute noise ensemble”(blossoming noise)

2007

- FERRAN FAGES “Cançons per a un lent retard”(Etude Records).

- V.A "The Art of the Gremlin" (Electronic Music Foundation Media).

Though Fages takes pains to assert that the present album is not a posthumous homage to his father, who died a month after the recording was concluded, 
and also dedicated it to his father’s caretaker, the music was clearly intended as a reaction to and an observation of what he refers to as “the slow decay of 
my father’s life”. I take it that it’s safe to translate the title as, “songs for a slow demise”.

I suppose it’s a natural tendency in such situations to create work which might be more accommodating to the person involved, in the case of more abstract-oriented artists, to turn toward more traditional and emotionally evocative formats. Jason Lescalleet, whose magnificent release from last year one can hardly help but recall, included his daughter singing “Molly Malone” and structured his noise-filled tape manipulations into a near programmatic summation of his loss and acceptance. While I’m certainly not familiar with everything Fages has committed to disc (I don’t know his earlier solo recording “a cavall entre dos cavalls”), the pieces on “cançons per a un lent retard” are far more overtly emotional in a traditional sense than anything I’ve previously heard from him, though they’re resolutely clear-eyed and unflinching. It’s some pretty great music.

Though one could easily note the almost mandatory sonic indebtedness to Bailey, Fages (on acoustic guitar throughout) is generally more consonant in approach but no less incisive. Sometimes, as near the beginning of the lengthy “suspense horizontal”, there are clear precedents in “opposite”-era Sugimoto. If anything, however, I found myself thinking of Loren Connors, though minus the blues saturation, substituting instead a Spanish melancholy with tinges of flamenco (occasionally quite clear as in the central portion of :tangent al dit” or much of “gir lent”). On “paraula clau”, Fages, otherwise heard solo, performs an intriguing duet with Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga who is responsible for detuning the guitar on the run, as it were, resulting in a haunting, bleak series of wavering moans, buzzes and taps. Fages tends to stay in the mid to lower range of the guitar, playing harshly plucked single notes against vast, abyssal chords that swallow them whole.

The technical and influential aspects are really secondary, though. The music here is extraordinary, often brutally so. Fages opens himself to the experience of a loved one’s deterioration, neither glancing away in “good taste” or reluctance to face reality nor ignoring the enormous emotional price it’s exacting on him. No pathos, just hard-edged sorrow.

When he closes the disc with “retall llorg”, using perhaps something like an e-bow on the strings to generate layers of morose drones before merging into a slow cascade of dolorous notes, there’s a sense of true exhaustion. It’s not pretty or hopeful, just very true.-Brian Olewnick (Bagatellen)

Sur son deuxième album  personnel,  Ferran Fages  illustre, au son d'une guitare folk, les étapes successives de la disparition de son père. Evidemment chargé. 
Sans cela: poignant quand même.

Cordes étouffées, distendues ou vibrantes, harmoniques et aigus sourdant des nappes graves, accords en suspension ou, au contraire, sur lequel le guitariste s'acharne, font la substance de Cançons per a un lent retard. Pour catalyser les émotions implacables, entre les résonances profondes et l'insistance d'aller-retours rapides au médiator, Fages va et vient, consignant une épreuve enfantant une musique plusieurs fois convaincante pour rien d'autre qu'elle-même: le temps d'une gnossienne disloquée (L'ombre del dit) ou, plus encore, d'une réflexion sur les effets de la répétition, formule revue et subtilement corrigée sur Suspens Horizontal.

De quoi relativiser l'appréhension que l'on peut ressentir au moment d'investir une expérience qui devrait nous rester étrangère.-Le Son du Grisli

The new trend in electronic music seems to be going acoustic and sometimes even start writing 'real songs'. Ferran Fages, a Catalan musician whose resume mentions, besides guitar, no-input mixer and turntables in Cremaster also took this step. On A cavall entre dos cavalls and this album it's just guitar.

Although radical, the approach isn't completely different. The music on Cançons per a un lent retard is very much everything that happens besides the notes. When strumming the strings a microscope is put on the 'unwanted sounds', as it were. Just to reveal all the overtones, scrapes, harmonics, resonations and even a mild drone that happen in this process and are very much wanted here. Although the endresult shows some similarity with the work of Derek Bailey and Eugene Chadbourne I feel Fages' approach in the end is closer to Alva Noto and Ryoji Ikeda, albeit less rhythmic.

Fages' impulse to compose this music was the slow decay of his father's life. Not a posthumous tribute, as the album was finished for a month when his father passed away. The music follows this by taking its time, slowly and thoughtful. Various techniques are used to get all kinds of sounds from the guitar, but still within the conventional means of pick and sometimes a bottleneck, no extended Chadbourne techniques. Some parts do remind of John Zorn's tribute to "Pops", the infamous The Book Of Heads. Cançons... is easier to digest than that one though. With its heavy theme of his father's decline it's by no means 'easy', it's heavy with emotion.

The devil is in the detail as the saying goes, this album needs to be played on a decent soundsystem at loud enough a volume to reveal all the intricacies that are invoked from the metal- and woodwork of the acoustic guitar. The only critique would be the length, it's quite heavy to sit through the entire 70 minute course of it. At the same time it feels rather disrespectful to turn it off halfway through. Had Ferran cut a little fat here and there it would've been a quite stunning album.-Martijn Busink (Musique Machine)

Ferran Fages is a musician from Barcelona, Spain who performs using turntables, electronics, and guitar. For “Cançons Per A Un Lent Retard,” he performs acoustic guitar pieces he created during the time leading up to his father’s death. Fages states in the liner notes, “The impulse to compose this music has been to accompany the slow decay of my father’s life. . . one way of expressing the anguish and emptiness of seeing and living a life slip away. It is not a posthumous homage.” Consequently, the nine tracks on the album are harsh and unsettling, yet extremely skillful in their portrayal of the range of strong emotions surrounding the decline and death of a loved one.

Fages deals in raw emotion throughout the album, conjuring feelings of sadness, emptiness, and anger. The sadder pieces have a dark, minimal quality with a huge emphasis on the spaces and silence in the music. Notes and chords are played and left to decay into complete silence. The beginning of the track “Suspens horitzontal” manipulates these spaces to great effect, taking long pauses between parts to allow the guitar to silence itself. Despite its simplicity, the piece overflows with dark emotion, making the sadness Fages must have felt palpable in the music.

In contrast to the quieter moments, there are pieces that pack a sharp bite. On these tracks, it sounds as if Fages is literally attacking his guitar with a series of dissonant chords and cutting notes. This is especially apparent in the heavy-sounding piece “Gir lent,” which rolls out in a series of loud, fractured chords. The sense of sadness remains, but is accompanied by a strong sense of anger. In these loud moments, it is easy to imagine the helpless anger surrounding death and the urge to fight the inevitable, but being wholly unable.

“Cançons Per A Un Lent Retard” is an extremely difficult album to digest, yet rewards perseverance. Close listening reveals the raw emotion echoed by each and every note. Probably, it is best heard in pieces to fully grip what is happening in each part without feeling drained or overwhelmed. Still, it is worth the time and effort to explore the deep recesses of this deceptively simple music. 8/10 -- Matt Blackall (Foxy Digitalis)

Everybody demands honesty in music, but noone wants an artist to really share himself completely with his audience. It is a sad (or, if you like, perfectly natural) fact that what a listener perceives as truthfulness and “emotion” is really just the recognition of a shared element in the voice of a performer and his own. So how can one appreciate a work like “Cancons per a un lent retard”, which takes its seat right next to you, just like the virtual parents in a Freud’ean marriage bed? The answer is you can’t – and that’s what makes it stick out from anything we’ve heard this year.

“The impulse to compose this music has been to accompany the slow decay of my father’s life”, Ferran Fages writes. It is the first important sentence attached to his second solo album. What is remarkable about it is the use of “accompany” instead of terms like “lament” or “cope with”. “Cancons per a un lent retard” finds Fages unable to yet “process” his feelings and maybe it even documents a time when he was incapable of any at all. It is, essentially, music to document the passing of time or even to replace it.

Unfiltered, the seconds tick away in tracks of between barely three and monumental seventeen minutes, while the album approaches its peak in the two epic states at its core. Of course, the word “accompany” also implies that these pieces were maybe the only friend in a phase of solitude. Their spartanely sparse instrumentation of only a single acoustic guitar and no additional overdubs or effect processing, let some faint and bodyless drones hidden in the chinks of the tapestry somewhere, certainly suggests so.

The second important statement is even shorter than the first: “It is not a posthumous homage”. Effectively, this means that “Cancons” is not about Fages’ father – but about the tragedy of loosing him and the helplessness which goes with that. For minutes, the guitarist slaps a single string to the point of break, churns out clustered chords, hammers raw riffs from his fingers in compositions which are going nowhere or at least not towards a tangible resolution. On the chilling “Paraula Clau”, space is filled with nothing but the sound of tunings and detunings – rarely have they sounded so intense.

As a listener, of course, one asks for a reason to undergo this torture. One could treat “Cancons per a un lent retard” as a cathartic exercise, as a ritual of cleansing, but that would mean diverting it from its real use. If you’re true to this work, then you’ll accept its inacceptance.

This music is the most absolute art there is, it is profoundly egoistical, existing just because it needed to be written, with no audience in mind and no practical use intended. That, however, is exactly what sharing means – allowing the other in and making him undergo what one experienced without looking for a message: If there’s nothing to understand, there’s nothing to explain.-Tobias Fisher (Tokafi)

Spanish guitarist Ferran Fages makes it clear that "Cancons Per a un Lent Retard" [roughly translating to "Songs for a Slow Death"] was driven by his father's slow decay. If any word could describe his pieces, it would not necessarily be sad [though they fit that category], but rather persistent and angry. In every tuning of his acoustic guitar, one hears unmistakable anger and fury. Every few seconds, Fages pauses as if to recall something about his dad. It's as if he tries to access his mind's memory banks and retrieve bits and pieces of his father's life. Pensive, but absolutely barren, with a drive that's greater than strength of a burning sun, Fages makes an absolutely convincing statement full of naked humanity.-Tom Sekowski (Gaz-Eta)

Despite having composed this music to “accompany the slow decay” of his late father, Ferran Fages also states that “it is not a posthumous homage”. Indeed it doesn’t sound like that: no plangent melodies, no gloomy atmospheres. Only an acoustic guitar and its strings, which Ferran touches with surprising conviction and decision, mostly concentrating on the relations between the different harmonics’ resonances and contrasts with a slight experimental aura, at times sparkled by the use of real-time detunings. He shows intelligence, restraint and sensitiveness at one and the same time. Halfway through the barely moving lines of a “new silence” outing and Loren Connors’ post-modern blues, “Cançons” is a long meditation on death - yes - but also a hymn to the necessary simplicity of an expressive means applied to a far-sighted aesthetic, equal to the one characterizing the Catalan’s work with entities such as Cremaster, Will Guthrie and Norbert Möslang. It is not a short record at over 70 minutes, yet there’s not a single instance in which it overstays its welcome. These “songs” are skeletally defined but complete, made even better by well-placed choices which, in a way, dehumanize their structure while letting us peep at a course of action to which the author himself seems to participate with a degree of detachment. It’s the sonic reproduction of that feeling of just apparent coldness acting as a protective barrier against the grieve of such a fundamental loss, and Fages makes perfectly clear that he’s learnt from this experience rather than having been overwhelmed by it. The final result is a definite step forward from his previous solo CD “A cavall entre dos cavalls”, an important artistic statement, an overall satisfactory release.-Massimo Ricci (Touching Extremes)

Me resulta un poco dificil hablar de este disco.Me produce respeto y al oírlo siento cierto desasosiego. Realizado durante la enfermedad y muerte de su padre,
Ángel Fages, no es un disco dedicado a él, sino a Anna, la persona que lo cuido durante su enfermedad. No es pues un disco de duelo, pero sí de vacio y 
soledad. Las notas de la guitarra acústica suenan ásperas y aisladas mientras se apagan lentamente. El título del disco no podía ser otro: cançons per a un 
lent retard. Hay profundos y largos silencios después de una dramática vibración de un armónico que se apaga. No hay segunda oportunidad. La realidad es
una. No es miedo lo que siento, pero sí algo cercano a la angustia. En cambio en algunos temas los acordes se suceden casi uno encima de otro. Lo siento 
como la huida, como si quisiera ponerse a correr hacia ninguna parte pero lejos. No es un disco para tenerlo en contra, has de tener el cuerpo pasivo porque

la emoción se moverá por si sola. Como un cuerpo en decadencia en ql que su corporeidad se nos muestra más clara, hay mucha materia en la manera de
tocar; los dedos que intuyes, la uña que rasga, la madera que se golpea accidentalmente... el cuerpo nunca es pesado. Es triste. Suena a llanto y a quejido.
Es un disco que demuestra la enorme emoción que se puede expresar a través de la música. Porque las palabras no sirven siempre. ¿Ya lo sabiamos no?
Por si se nos olvida, Ferran nos lo recuerda. -Cristina Tascón (Nativa)