Ronroco Rococo Memories
The Ronroco is a stringed instrument of the Andean regions and it is the baritone relative of the charango. Its sound box was traditionally made from the shell of an armadillo or tortoise but is now commonly made of wood. It typically has 10 strings in five courses of 2 strings each.
Rococo is an exceptionally ornamental and dramatic style of architecture, art and decoration. It combines asymmetry, undulating curves and elaborate ornamentation to create surprise and the illusion of motion and drama. It is often described as the final expression of the Baroque movement.
Inspired by the ronroco album of Gustavo Santaolalla, OdNu uses the ronroco as a source of sound and takes it to new territories by exploring sound deconstructions and decomposing it through effects chains that include a modular system, Zoia patches and a Blooper to create a lush palette of sounds that even though they have originated from the Ronroco it's at times hard to imagine its source. The album is also full of bubbling rococo ronroco arpeggios that exude melancholic melodies supported by the addition of synth sounds and field recordings. All of these elements takes the album outside of the world music realm and into an experimental micro sound and textural dreamscape full of subconscious memories from OdNu's Argentinian past.
Tracklisting:
- Unused
- Under the Igloo
- Adaptogenic
- Loco
- Radiance
- Rain Frogs
- Groundhogs
- Dividing
- Meaning
- La Ultima Vez
- Arena y Sol
OdNu
Michel Mazza's compositions are a constant experiment and interplay of instruments, different techniques, electronics and his moods and feelings. He often works with repetitive tiny melodies creating a dialogue between them amid textures of grainy decomposed sounds often from his main instrument the guitar but also including synths, (usually triggered using the midi guitar), field recordings and other acoustic instruments, the result is melodic, cinematic and otherworldly.
Credits:
• Composed, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered by Michel Mazza
• Michel Mazza plays the ronroco, electronics, modular system, zoia, blooper
• Picture Cover art by Michel Mazza (Traslasierra Córdoba, Argentina)
Reviews
The Slow Music Movement
OdNu celebrate the Ronroco a modern descendent of the centuries old, once tortoise shell hewn Andean stringed instrument. Incredibly using it as the only sound source, he deploys electronic alchemy to deconstruct, morph, reconstruct, shatter again, then painstakingly arrange the instruments folkloric vibrations into a deeply moving, Latinfuturistic odyssey that soar over the mountains to embrace a vibrant, vivid, electroacoustic ambient future.
Read original > HERE
Igloo Magazine
The Andean Ronroco is a stringed instrument, and Rococo is a dramatic and ornamental architectural, artistic, and decorative style. These references serve as the basis for Ronroco Rococo Memories, a densely packed 11-track album with tastefully placed acoustic textures flowing with micro-organic tones. The raison d’être of this Argentine-born and NYC/Hudson, NY-based artist (aka Michel Mazza) is that he hears music when he sees images and vice versa. This is made clear as the album shifts between acoustic and mild electronic parts, experimenting with various audio methods, moods, and emotions along the way.
Although adjectives like “cinematic” and “otherworldly” are appropriate, there’s a more subtle, palpable message conveyed here. We can imagine the beauty of sound emanating from the Ronroco and its calming cascade, maybe because of the smaller sound particles that manage to make their way through the mist and delicately slide down jagged mountainside slopes as depicted by the cover artwork. Highlights appear in many shapes and forms, including “Unused,” “Under the Igloo” (how appropriate!), “Radiance ,” “Meaning,” “La Ultima Vez,” and the closing brittle beat-patches of “Arena y Sol.”
Read original > HERE
African Paper
In the coming days, Audiobulb will be releasing a new digital album by the Argentine-American musician Michel Mazza alias OdNu, who readers of our pages should know from his collaboration with Ümlaut, among other things. On “Ronroco Rococo Memories” the artist takes into account his great interest in different instruments, his desire to explore their possibilities and his knack for unusual combinatorics and works with a string instrument known in the Andean region called Ronroco. The ten-string instrument, whose sound box in earlier eras consisted of a turtle shell but is now mostly made of wood, is similar to the charango and is its baritone counterpart. Mazza, who is trained on the guitar, plays various, mostly melancholic and otherworldly-seeming melodies on the Ronroco, the ornamentation of which is inspired by the music and general aesthetics of Rococo, which does not appear in the title just for punning reasons. He combines all of this with the use of field recordings and other instruments, including electronic ones, which subtly complement the sound.
“The Ronroco is a stringed instrument of the Andean regions and it is the baritone relative of the charango. Its sound box was traditionally made from the shell of an armadillo or tortoise but is now commonly made of wood. It typically has 10 strings in five courses of 2 strings each. Rococo is an exceptionally ornamental and dramatic style of architecture, art and decoration. It combines asymmetry, undulating curves and elaborate ornamentation to create surprise and the illusion of motion and drama. It is often described as the final expression of the Baroque movement. Inspired by the ronroco album of Gustavo Santaolalla, OdNu uses the ronroco as a source of sound and takes it to new territories by exploring sound deconstructions and decomposing it through effects chains that include a modular system, Zoia patches and a Blooper to create a lush palette of sounds that even though they have originated from the Ronroco it’s at times hard to imagine its source. The album is also full of bubbling rococo ronroco arpeggios that exude melancholic melodies supported by the addition of synth sounds and field recordings. All of these elements takes the album outside of the world music realm and into an experimental micro sound and textural dreamscape full of subconscious memories from OdNu’s Argentinian past”.
Read original > HERE
Musique Machine
Native to the Andean regions of South America, the ronroco is a baritone variant of the more well-known charango and is the primary source material for OdNu’s (aka Michel Mazza) latest release, Ronroco Rococo Memories. Mazza, a native of Argentina, takes the stringed instrument and processes it through various guitar effects, such as the Chase Bliss Audio Blooper and Empress Effects Zoia, both of which feature looping programs as well as a host of on board effects. What can be heard throughout the 11 tracks is pitch shifting and reverse delay above all else, with backing tracks of slow baselines and shimmery synth textures to round out the sonic palette. We get rare glimpses of the ronroco on its own, in the introductory phrases of “Under the Igloo”, for example, though the organic is routinely swallowed by waves of digital signal processing.
The aforementioned phrasing and shifted pitching make the ronroco sound at times like a hammered dulcimer or lute, echoing Laraaji and other ambient pioneers, while staying firmly within the world of the guitar. Mazza’s picking can be subtle and at times percussive, highlighted in particular on “Dividing”, which seems to take its cue from the interplay between analog and digital devices. It is not entirely new ground, but the ronroco’s placement within a context of colonization and ambivalent heritage make Ronroco Rococo Memories something of a standout in its field. As for the Rococo in the album’s title, the emphasis on decorative ephemera as opposed to a chugging, central protagonist, puts the question of framing – cultural, musical, technological – front and centre, collecting and repurposing the effects of this unique context rather than attempting to overwrite or correct them.
For fans of ambient textures with stringed instruments, heavily processed, which update in important respects the works of earlier pioneers like Laraaji and others. There is enough layering of material to reward repeated listens, and when taken as a document of ethnomusicology, Ronroco Rococo Memories may ultimately point the way toward new, resonant encounters within the scenography of colonialism and its legacies. To check it for yourself.
Read original > HERE
Inactuelles
OdNu is the musical pseudonym of Michel Mazza , an Argentine composer born in Buenos Aires, now based in Hudson (New York State). A prolific musician, we owe him numerous albums. He joins Ronroco Rococo Memories in the wake of another Argentinian composer, Gustavo Santaolalla (born in 1951), author of a disc titled Ronroco released by Nonesuch Records in 1998.
What is ronroco? A stringed instrument with pitches lower than those of the charango, but higher than those of the guitar. Designed in 1968 by Bolivian Gonzalo Hermosa of the folk group Los Kjarkas , it was originally made from the shell of an armadillo or turtle, but its body today is mostly made of wood. It is generally an accompaniment instrument.
OdNu makes a completely different use of it, using it as a sound source at the heart of deconstructions, decompositions using synthesizers. Other electronic sounds and field sounds create a universe that can bring to mind the rococo aesthetic, ornamental and overloaded, creating illusions. The suite composed by the name of the instrument, with which the word "rococo" is juxtaposed, already evokes the repetitive motifs characteristic of the record.
Swirling arpeggios, multiplied shimmering surfaces, create a changing world of harmonious and harmonic clouds. Small repeated patterns keep popping up like bubbles. We walk through vast landscapes with variations in light. The eleven compositions, between three minutes thirty and eight minutes thirty each, take the time to make us lose contact with solid and material reality. "Under The Igloo" (track 2) gradually takes a hypnotic turn, lulling us with swirling ronroco cells and saxophone winds (?) carried away by long waves of synthesizers. OdNu's music lapping endlessly, so seductive that we let ourselves be enveloped, that we abandon ourselves.
The longest piece, "Adaptogenic" (title 3), although it has a discreetly epic dimension, loaded with thicker, rumbling textures, is bathed in a climate of dreamy nostalgia. It is a lament which never ceases to soar, to be reborn, a largo of overwhelming sweetness, a beautiful mixture of plucked strings and quivering layers. "Loco" (title 4) first alternates a pattern of a few notes and a note repeated alone, but very quickly the loop becomes richer, spreads over several levels, joined by other sounds, clear or murky, such as a sculpture or frieze overloaded with motifs that overwhelms us with details. It's a deeper and deeper spiral, a wonderful psychotropic drug!
We hear memories of Latin American folk music, for example at the beginning of "Radiance" (track 5), memories used as generative motifs. Very quickly, the composer disorients them, transplants them into a proliferating environment. OdNu's music is often kaleidoscopic, playing multiple fragments. It is rococo in the sense that, as in baroque art, but more exasperated, it aims to become nothing more than movement through the multiplication of curves and levels. Everything ends up shimmering, dissolving in a rain of sound shrouded in a thousand resonances and colors.
Groundhogs” (track 7) once again takes the multiple and incessant entanglement of sound components to its highest level of unreality. Curious leaping, crawling “marmots”, a frightening fragmented ballet, for ecstatic levitation! The further you advance in the album, the more you are spellbound, as in the extraordinary "Dividing" (track 8), taking advantage of the effect of the previous track, because this music is cumulative. Each track becomes the stage of a trance, you find yourself listening to the same track twice, three times, won over by the irresistible swaying of increasingly oceanic, dazzling music. “Meaning” (track 9) carries the music into electric clouds streaked with micro storms: are we not even inside the clouds? The tight repetitive loops, sometimes echoing, are crossed by various bursts of sound in an undulating flow between appearance and disappearance. More crystalline, "La Ultima Vez" is punctuated with drones, lightning, an immense palace of resonances. All in slippage, the last title, "Arena y Sol" ( Sand and Sun ), crumbles in a myriad of refractions, on the verge of dissolution: in my opinion it lacks a foundation, a real structure, perhaps be deliberately to mark the end of the album. Let's forget it if necessary!
OdNu gives the ronroco, son of the charango, itself son of the old Spanish guitars imported into the Andes, letters of contemporary nobility, working its sounds with a consummate art of electronic music to weave bewitching ambient webs on the border of 'unreal minimalism.
Read original > HERE