Drifting, Almost Falling (UK)
Heavily looped based, the pieces also utilise sounds that can come in so briefly and retreat as well as those that roll in cycles with the other loops. With music which is constructed with a similar base it can feel one dimensional and as much as I like repetition and minimalism in music, I also appreciate multidimensional pieces which is what Sustainer offers. At times you feel as if you are listening to a film noir soundtrack thanks to the use of strings throughout (see “Anticuario #06” for example) and at other times or a suspense soundtrack like on “Anticuario #04” where Alarcón nicely cuts sections of small sound and puts them into loop form which enhances their affect. The quality you notice with the music is an attention to detail. This is not the kind of release where little though has been placed. Alarcón clearly has an idea about using sound from the past and re-framing it. The success to this material is the variance within the pieces as well as depth in the sounds. The dynamics are definitely there as the pieces reveal themselves with both the subtle moments and those which are more pronounced.

“Anticuario” has a timeless sort of presence which makes for a delightful listen. As much as it feels cinematic, it also feels experimental. The end result is a release which opens with the idea of re-discovering long lost pieces of music and utilising them to create fantastically rich pieces which you won’t tire of hearing. “Anticuario” is available on Limited LP (100 copies on clear vinyl) and Digital.

A closer listen (UK)
Anticuario (Antiquated) is a tribute to sounds lost and found, less the work of a crate-digger than a historian. Alex Alarcón (Sustainer) likens the process of creation to visiting an antique shoppe and experiencing the psychic power of bygone eras.  On the one hand, these are old songs brought to life, akin to one fan playing forgotten classics for another.  But since the music is not presented in its original form, the album is more like the restoration of an old house with new colors and trim.  The cover art represents the forms cut from history and rearranged with a sense of feng shui.

There are no track titles per se, but a suite numbered one through six.  The easiest comparison is to The Caretaker, but there’s little haunting here; Anticuaro is more of a celebration as old songs and genres are invited to frolic on the mansion lawn.  In the opening piece, strings set the stage, then race off to reveal chimes.  Loops tumble in a smooth manner, without crackle.  One of the most obvious differences between Sustainer and other nostalgic artists is the number of samples in each piece.  Instead of elongating single loops throughout tracks, Alarcón shares as many as possible.  Occasionally they do sound like ballroom (the beginning of “#02”), but only for a few seconds at a time.  The curiosity is in the soft transitions which border on silence, producing a sense of patience.  There’s a lot to show, but there’s plenty of time.

“Anticuario #03” leaps from the speakers like the opening notes of a movie.  The volume quickly retreats to reveal something more romantic.  Sustainer is enamored with both the sounds and the process of discovery.  In mid-piece, the movement again grows hushed, underlining the detail that these are not songs with repeated choruses, but medleys of music most listeners will never be able to identify.  Like a D.J., Sustainer is conscious of chords, ensuring a seamless flow within tracks.  One does wonder how the album might have played as a single track, although this would have meant sloughing the edges.

The brass segment that begins at 3:06 of “#04” is my favorite part of the set, a reminder that I might have to look up more old brass music.  That’s the beauty of the album: by resurrecting fragments of the past, rather than entire songs, Sustainer leads the ear forward rather than back: an ironic statement given that the album itself is new, and represents a modern genre.  Since this is vinyl, one can imagine beatsmiths adding percussion to these tracks, repurposing them yet again.  Some day, today’s music will seem antiquated as well, its beauty obscured by dust and the allure of the new.  (Richard Allen)

Silence And Sound (FR)
Alex Alarcón alias Sustainer explore et malaxe les musiques populaires tombées dans l’oubli, pour en extraire une matière première dont il sculptera les essences, donnant vie à sa propre création.

A coups de loops et de superpositions, Sustainer compose un univers gorgé de cordes, où l’accumulation de samples et de cuts offrent au passé une perspective de présent et de futur, tirant du passé les bribes mélodiques capables de faire le voyage dans le temps.

Anticuario ne porte pas son titre au hasard, conçu autour d’albums méconnus et ignorés, recouverts de cire poussiéreuse, fondements d’un monde en perpétuel mouvement, se mordant la queue pour aller de l’avant, éternel recyclage de substances mortes-nées, renaissant de leurs cendres dans un glorieux présent, voué lui même à se faire avaler. Somptueux. (Roland Torres)

A closer listen // The top 20 albums of 2016 (UK)
Medicina‘s haunted sounds are composed out of half-forgotten melodies and rusty orchestral compositions. They arrive from the 60’s and 70’s, but they sound much older than that: like some lost Disney picture from the 1940’s that was actually never released for fear of it being too dark. And, seemingly overnight, this kind of music disappeared, too; it never showed up in the record stores, never mind year-end lists. These easy sounds are lifted from muzak, but they’re more than that. As they’re looped and layered, they weave a darkly magical spell through its hundred-acre woodland of ambient. Sustainer (Barcelona’s Alex Alarcón) has created a record that is made all the stronger for its use of overlooked, lonely and undervalued elements. Remember, music is for life, not just for Christmas. At times as light as the hop of a bunny, it later drunkenly descends into a dark daze where its dreams morph into ink-stained nightmares that blot out the joy of the conscious mind, and the bright rays of an animated sun, its smiling face etched in pencil and ink, are slowly erased.  (James Catchpole)

A closer listen (UK)
On the surface, Medicina seems like a lost album from The Caretaker, until one considers its pedigree.  These old records didn’t come from the 20s and 30s, but the 60s and 70s.  They represent a loving reclamation of a maligned form of music: as Alex Alarcón (Sustainer) puts it, “muzak, light music, easy listening, elevator music, or whatever they like to call it”.  Wait a minute ~ these sounds were good?  In the hands of Barcelona’s Sustainer, they are.

Context is important.  For Alarcón, records like these, played by his parents, were some of his first musical sounds.  We never forget our first love.  As a child, what do we know about taste, or kitsch, or the dismissal of forms?  The purpose of this brand of music was to be unobtrusive, the tone introverted, inspiring the term “aural wallpaper”.  In order to create it, musicians had to fight against an urge to be noticed.  Yet as dull or cheesy as one might consider this sub-genre, it did possess a certain off-kilter beauty.  This wasn’t the way music was supposed to sound.

The otherworldly nature of Medicina highlights the feeling that something in the music is out of vibration with the rest of nature.  These loops, every one of them beautiful in their current context (making one curious about their original sources), approach like mist from distant shores, visible yet intangible.  They seem like the fulfillment of an audiophile’s childhood dream: taking the best parts from otherwise unimpressive songs and using them to form a collage.  While such techniques are often used in hip-hop, they are meant more to highlight the samples than to liberate them from unflattering settings.  And in this instance, the majority of the loops are orchestral.  Alarcón uses field recordings, as well as light touches of original music, to flesh out the compositions: footsteps, distant drums, and of course, an elevator.  The difference is that this is the rare sort of music that would make one want to stay in an elevator instead of racing through the doors as it opens.

This brings us to a larger point: the use of muzak in general.  Now on the wane, such music is often replaced by 80s pop-rock hits, the “new non-obtrusive”.  Yet for those who lived through these songs when they were popular, they are obtrusive.  We thought that we were done with them, but they keep coming back.  They make one want to put down the phone, exit the shopping line, leave the carnival.  Curious music, on the other hand, has a way of drawing one in.  Might shoppers be enticed to enter a store playing music both like and unlike any they’d ever heard?  For the general public, Medicina fits the bill.  We may have even heard these specific songs before, but never in this context.  Alarcón has taken the wallpaper off the walls to reveal the luscious wood beneath.  (Richard Allen)

Polyphonia (PL)
Sustainer to solowe przedsięwzięcie Alexa Alarcóna pochodzącego z Barcelony. Producent aktywnie działa od 2003 roku, publikując płyty w takich labelach jak Italic, Thinner, Room40, Tessellate Recordings. Artysta tworząc materiał na „Medicina” sięgnął po niepublikowane nagrania ze swoich zbiorów, a także skorzystał z sampli – głównie partii orkiestrowych – wyjętych ze starych winyli z lat 60. i 70., wypełnionych muzakami. Alarcónowi udało się nadać zupełnie inny wydźwięk tym banalnym formom instrumentalnym. Hiszpan utkał z nich swoistą muzykę ilustracyjną w stylu Ryuichiego Sakamoto z domieszką hauntologii The Caretaker, a następnie podkleił ją ambientowym krajobrazem.

Music won´t save you (IT)
Nell’incessante processo di osmosi tra sperimentazione elettronica e sonorità acustiche, capita sempre più spesso che a queste ultime si avvicinino artisti invece in precedenza completamente dediti alle macchine. L’ultimo in ordine di tempo a compiere il percorso, tanto per smentire i luoghi comuni su musicisti che si limitano a premere i tasti di un computer, è il catalano Alex Alarcón, alias Sustainer, che in “Medicina” raccoglie sette tracce create a partire da strumenti acustici e calando singoli frammenti sonori in contesti ambientali non filtrati dall’elettronica.
Applicando tale approccio a una varietà di materiale raccolto nell’ultimo biennio a partire soprattutto da opere di compositori degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, Alarcón ha confezionato variegate texture analogiche giustapposte in loop più o meno estesi nelle quali le fonti sonore originarie rivivono sotto forma di ambientazioni spettrali, costellate da una sequenza di frammenti in graduale evoluzione, verso saturazioni moderatamente rumorose o, più spesso, nella direzione di vere e proprie aperture orchestrali velate da una opaca patina temporale. Brani quali “Medicina 01” e Medicina 04” rimandano infatti a un approccio “hauntologico”, seppure applicato a contenuti meno risalenti e granulosi rispetto a quelli compilato da Leyland Kirby nei suoi dischi a nome The Caretaker, ulteriormente amplificato nella pièce lirica che funge da elemento portante di “Medicina 06”.
Sull’altro piatto della bilancia creativa di Alarcón permane tuttavia inalterata la sua vocazione ambientale, risultante nelle modulazioni vaporose di “Medicina 02” e nell’oscura densità sintetica di “Medicina 05”, ancora popolata da residui impulsi ritmici depotenziati, come quelli che scuotono appena l’orizzonte nebbioso della conclusiva “Medicina 07”.
Combinando l’estemporaneità di una materia sonora concreta con la consapevole costruzione di sequenze atmosferiche immateriali, nella stessa misura in cui nella sua musica gli elementi di sintesi convivono con quelli acustici, Alarcón ha tracciato in “Medicina” una terza via all’”hauntologia ambientale”, frutto al tempo stesso dell’aspetto fotografico di tale pratica artistica e, soprattutto, di un processo di rielaborazione tanto pronunciato da trasformarne le suggestioni in qualcosa di vivo e distante dalle proprie premesse apparenti.

So what musica (IT)
Hanno il sapore di colonne sonore che giungono da lontano nel tempo, commenti sonori di immagini sbiadite cariche di ricordi, le sette istantanee create da Alex Alarcón aka Sustainer  che definiscono il punto 48 sulla mappa eilean.
Costruite a partire da vecchie incisioni risalenti agli anni ’60 e ’70, le tracce creano un flusso analogico fatto di suoni estrapolati e rimodulati in stratificazioni dal sapore nostalgico e vagamente sinistro, che nel loro reiterarsi danno vita a narrazioni dense e avvolgenti. L’ambience risultante ha in sé una vena costante di inquietudine dal portato cinematico amplificata da enfatiche aperture orchestrali (“Medicina 1”, “Medicina 3”, “Medicina 4”), che a tratti vira  verso eteree tessiture su fondali finemente polverosi (“Medicina 2”) o si concretizza attraverso trame maggiormente cupe (“Medicina 5”).
“Medicina” segna attraverso l’utilizzo delle fonti acustiche uno stacco rispetto la precedente produzione di Alarcón incentrata in modo pressoché esclusivo sui suoni sintetici, costruendo un microcosmo sonoro affascinante e misterioso.

Foreign Accents Pdx (US)
On Medicina, long-active Barcelona musician and sound artist Alex Alarcón, aka Sustainer, plunders keening and swooning string samples to create an ephemeral hauntology that’d certainly go well with a Saul Bass opening titles sequence. The swirling loops, generally sourced from obscure easy-listening records, through sheer repetition become something else entirely, draped with tension and romantically-flowing evocation of memory. Capturing these brief windows of dramas in music that is generally so forgettable, Sustainer creates a nostalgia for waiting times and moments in transit– he even included a field-recording of an elevator ride, as if to drive the idea home! It is most definitely worth mentioning that this project, begun around 2014,  represents Sustainer’s first foray into sampling. The forty-eighth point on the Eilean map is pretty lovely stuff, and sure to go down as easily for you as it did for I.

Clubbingspain (ES)
Nos llegan noticias desde Lincolnshire, lugar desde donde Harry Towell dirige su sello Tessellate Recordings desde el 2012 ya que el próximo lunes sale a la venta su nueva referencia, un CDr firmado por el productor barcelonés Sustainer.Este nuevo trabajo de Alex Alarcón, nombre real del productor que se esconde tras el proyecto Sustainer, está formado por cinco piezas de electrónica intimista y atmosférica cuyos snippets puedes escuchar más abajo.
Durante el proceso de grabación, Alex buscó cada objeto resonante en su casa y descubrió que los artículos de metal, cerámica y cristal tenían un uso particular. Estos fueron golpeados con mazos de caucho y posteriormente los cargaba en un pedal. Una vez que recogidos estos sonidos y tonos, fueron luego cuidadosamente pulidos utilizando diversas técnicas. El artista ha intentado crear un disco formado en su totalidad a partir de los sonidos de su entorno, utilizando su casa como instrumento. Su intención era crear texturas que reflejaran la paz de la casa, algo que sólo podría lograrse allí, ya que las grabaciones de campo al aire libre en ocasiones pueden ser muy ruidosas.
Sustainer lleva en activo desde el año 2003 y a lo largo de estos 12 años de carrera ha editado en sellos como Italic, Thinner, Enypnion y más recientemente en Room40 (con un álbum titulado Radiolas del que hablamos hace un par de meses).

Irregular Crates (UK)
Tessellate Recordings have released their 8th release and this is their fifth physical edition. The label has seen artist albums from Spheruleus, Felix Gebhard, VLNA, Polaroid Notes and now Sustainer as well as compilation material from many of the world’s finest modern Ambient artists, such as Offthesky, The Green Kingdom, Pleq and Damian Valles. The label has seen packaging that has ranged from a simple printed card wallet, a digipack, envelope packaging with card photo prints and now a hand-stamped edition from Sustainer which features a beautiful vinyl-effect CDr. The album itself is a liquid affair, with artist Alex Alarcon recording sounds in and around his house, then liquifying the tonal sounds of ceramics, crystals and various other objects.

Fluid Radio (UK)
Barcelona based artist Alex Alarcón, who has been recording as Sustainer since 2003. His work has appeared on labels such as Italic, Thinner, Enypnion and most recently the digital album ‘Radiolas’ on Room 40. His sound is built around harmonic Ambient drones and in ‘Taps’, we are proud to present a short album of liquiform pieces which started life as tonal household objects, woven into a watery tapestry. During the recording process, Alex searched for every resonant object in his home and found that metal, ceramic and crystal items were of particular use. These were struck with rubber-textile mallets and fed into a loop pedal via contact mics. Once these sounds and tones were collected, they were then carefully polished into fluid timbres, using various techniques. He strived to create a record made entirely from the sounds of his environment, using his home as an instrument. He wanted to create textures that reflected the peace of home which could only be achieved there, since outdoor field recordings can be so noisy at times.

Lend me your ears (US)
These ears have made few more welcome new acquaintances this year than Alex Alarcon’s Sustainer. No real surprise, though, considering the pedigree of his ravishing Radiolas – released on Lawrence English‘s Room40, mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Frosted with shortwave fuzz & punctuated by morse-like bleeps, these eight pieces constitute a hymn of & to communicating across the darkness – a set of aural messages in a bottle, pushed into the void out of hope & longing. & now there’s Taps too – a lovely, glowing exercise in a kind of muffled domestic Gamelan via Tessellate.
Sustainer’s Radiolas, shares a similar tale of horizontal inspirations. Whilst recovering from a serious health condition, Alex Alarcón aka Sustainer, began working with a very limited palette of equipment at arms reach. This mix of small recorders, pedals and other electronics become a processing chain through which he started to feed shortwave radio recordings.
Having worked with radio recordings previously it didn’t take long for these recordings to take on a very personal and cathartic aesthetic.

Ondarock (IT)
A ben dodici anni dal suo esordio solista, «Cuántico», e una serie di Ep seminata tra 2009 e 2011, Alex Alarćon torna a sfornare un album a nome Sustainer. Il disco, intitolato «Radiolas», è uscito il 16 ottobre per Room40, l’etichetta discografica di Lawrence English che quest’anno ha già sfornato lavori, fra gli altri, di Rafael Anton Irisarri, Mike Cooper, Chihei Hatakeyama e Tim Hecker (la ristampa di «Norberg» e «Apondalifa» usciti in 7″ ed Ep una manciata di anni fa).

Stationary Travels (USA)
While recovering from a serious health condition, Alex Alarcón, aka Sustainer, took a page from the book of none other than Brian Eno by embracing his condition as an opportunity for musical exploration within the constraints forced upon him and the equipment within his limited reach. Whereas Eno drew inspiration from the sounds of hospital machinery around him, Alarcón found his unlikely muse in radio frequencies which he fashioned into his latest recording now out on Room40, Radiolas.
The label describes the album as “a metaphoric ocean of harmonic noise”. Indeed it takes some time listening to acclimate the ear to the harmonic elements, but the effect is mesmerizing and eventually quite soothing once it does. The grainy hum and sizzling crackle of overlapping frequencies begin to coalesce into patterns as melodic fragments emerge and recede. I found the middle section of the album particularly immersive with a string of tracks that manage to summon a vague sense of nostalgia (‘Radio 04’) and melancholy (‘Radio 06’). It is an ambitious concept, but an inspired one that succeeds in creating a unique and absorbing listening experience.