Tim Olive, Alfredo Costa Monteiro

Format: Glass-mastered CD. Packaging: Recycled Chipboard Sleeve. 33 bays was recorded in October 2009 in Kyoto, during a Japan tour by the duo of Tim Olive and Alfredo Costa Monteiro. Recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, the two untitled tracks were chosen from a number of pieces captured over several days, showcasing the duo's attunement and dramatic sense of structure. Olive (one-string electric guitar) and Costa Monteiro (electro-acoustic devices) produce a rough, feral music with moments of surprising calm and beauty, using basic technology to blast into other realms, dark atmospheres of varying density and great textural variety. Sharp transitions and gradual transformations carry the listener from seeming chaos to ordered spaces pierced by shafts of light. 33 bays, the first release on Kobe-based label 845 Audio, is available as a glass-mastered CD with a recycled chipboard sleeve. 845 Audio is an artist-run label with a non-profit pricing policy. Tim Olive has been writing about himself in the third person since the beginning of this century, when he left his minimal-prog-noise-rock band Nimrod, rejecting periodic rhythms and tempered pitch in favor of improvisation and open forms, exploring the full sonic possibilities of steel strings, magnetic pickups and simple analog electronics. Extensive live action in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia has provided opportunities to play with a wide range of musicians in event-specific one-off contexts, as well as ongoing collaborations with Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Katsura Mouri, and Jeffrey Allport and others. Recent collaborators include Crys Cole, Takahiro Kawaguchi, Jin Sangtae, Ryu Hankil, Choi Joonyong and Che Chen. Upcoming releases include recordings with Katsura Mouri, Kazuya Ishigami, Cal Lyall and Guilty Connector.Alfredo Costa Monteiro was born in 1964 in Porto (Portugal), lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. He studied sculpture-installation in Paris with Christian Boltanski. In 1992, he moved to Barcelona. His work stands somewhere between visual arts, visual poetry and sound. His installations and sound pieces, all of a low-fi character, have in common an interest in unstable processes, raw materials and gestures, where the manipulation of objects as instruments or instruments as objects has a strong phenomenological aspect. In sound poetry, he performs in solo polyglot and noise pieces (Portuguese, French and Spanish), where sound establishes a different semantics. Ongoing sound projects: Cremaster (with Ferran Fages), i treni inerti (with Ruth Barberán), Atolón(with Ferran Fages and Ruth Barberán), Astero (with Juan Matos Capote), 300 basses (with Jonas Kocher and Luca Venitucci) and duos with Pascal Battus, Tim Olive and Michel Doneda.