The architecture of the end resonates throughout MISERERE, the latest and most denuded realization of Concrete Fantasies' decade-long post-noise, post-ambient sounding of process and space. Recorded in a workshop for grave fabrication, MISERERE finds Concrete Fantasies DAWless, stripping back to its beginnings in free improvisation and musique concrète to rebuild this space in sounds as wretched and transcendent as the tomb.


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"That music was the distant roll of the thunder which sank into murmurs as the tempest subsided; it was the blowing of the wind which groaned in the hollow of the mountain; it was the monotonous splash of the cascade falling down the crag; and the drip of the filtered waterdrops, and the hoot of the hidden owl, and the gliding sound of the uneasy reptiles. All this was in the music, and something more that cannot be expressed nor scarcely conceived."
— Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer


Sound is made of space. Captured, processed, distributed, reproduced, no amount of desecration erases the mark of its space. There is sound buried in Our Lady of Almudena Cemetery. The slow crack of bones resonates in sepulchers built at the nearby workshop in La Elipa, now put in service of music rather than tomb making.


This workshop is the sound of MISERERE, the fifth album of Concrete Fantasies and the culmination of a project both pushed to its extreme and stripped to its primitive essence. Inspired as much by the pulsing electric blues of John Lee Hooker as by Keijo Haino's crudest lamentations, MISERERE abandons digital production and finds its craftsman's hands bare—straining to sculpt in sound one room's marvelous beauty and desperate grief.


With recording and production assistance from Hugo Calcio, MISERERE reaches toward this impossibility by deploying an armory of mics, amps, mixing boards, conventional instruments and furniture. A live improvisation performed to a public in complete darkness is stitched together with solitary explorations to form the trilogy of title tracks at the core of this effort.


As with the music of Bécquer's legend, which left its would-be transcriber deaf and mad, unknowability predominates and empties conventional description of merit. What we are left with is a half remembered melody intoned through a piano anguished by each repetition, the woeful comedy of an angel's trumpet declaring dubious revelation, and an unplayed guitar's unrelenting cry of true contrition.

But these images are placeholders, names put on the unnameable. The truth is a sound heard in a shared dream, in a borrowed room, in a drowning city. A sound neither confirmed nor denied, emitted from nowhere and residing there eternally. A final resting place, carved in feedback.

Improvised, performed and recorded byConcrete Fantasies
Additional performance on track"SIN TÍTULO"by Franco Watanabe
Additional performance on track"THIS LIFE WE CHOSE IT"by Franco Watanabe& Balance
Engineered,Master & mixing by Guillermo Basterrechea Arévalo
Cover photography by Laura Costas
Text by Ameen Mettawa