Amultamento - 2026 - Amultamento 1&2

Self Released – None

 The seventeen titles on Amultamento 1&2 initially suggest a collection of compact experimental pieces, but the timings reveal a more elegant design. They add up to four movements of almost exactly twelve minutes each, one for every side of the double vinyl edition. The lowercase letters are not really song titles so much as windows cut into a larger structure. They allow the digital listener to enter at various points, yet the music has been conceived as four continuous panels: Amultamento 1, Part One and Part Two, followed by Amultamento 2, Part One and Part Two. That symmetry is the first indication that this apparently unruly object has an architectural intelligence beneath its bristling surface.

Amultamento brings together Nick Mott, Clarence Manuelo and Aaron Moore, three quarters of Volcano the Bear, with J.C. Freer, who records independently as You’re Alive But You Are Dead. Daniel Padden, the remaining member of Volcano the Bear, makes one concentrated appearance, duetting with Manuelo on guitars during the fifty-second “amultamento 1 PART TWO b.” The family resemblance is therefore impossible to miss, but the decision to give the project a new name matters. This is not presented as a reduced Volcano the Bear album or an auxiliary release placed in brackets beside the main discography. Amultamento establishes a separate organism, one in which Freer’s electronics, synthesizers and keyboards are embedded at the foundation rather than added as surface treatment.

The published instrument list reads partly like session documentation and partly like evidence recovered from an eccentric laboratory. Organ pipes, saxophones, trumpets, harps, strings, percussion, guitars, synthesizers and voices are joined by tractors, Igenix appliances, “romantic drumpads” and various unspecified great things, electronic and otherwise. The humor is important because it prevents the inventory from becoming a display of avant-garde seriousness. These musicians have never required an object to possess an official musical function before inviting it onto a recording. Air moving through a household machine, an agricultural engine, a length of pipe, a reed, a wire and a human throat can all become members of the same temporary ensemble.

That equality among sound sources is central to the album. Acoustic instruments do not represent nature while electronics represent machinery; neither side is assigned a stable role. A saxophone can become a streak of raw material, while electronic sound may behave with the irregularity of breath or weather. Percussion can establish motion and then dissolve into texture. Voices appear less as narrators than as another physical substance, capable of becoming gesture, interruption or atmosphere. Moments resembling chamber music, free improvisation, electroacoustic composition, damaged folk ritual and homemade science fiction pass through the same rooms without requiring borders between them.

The first Amultamento is divided into ten sections, several lasting less than two minutes. Those divisions create a sensation of rapid mutation, with forms arriving, exposing one unusual feature and slipping into the next chamber before they can become settled compositions. Yet heard as two complete twelve-minute sides, these are not miniatures arranged in a row. They are stages within a continuous act of assembly and disassembly. A texture may seem to have vanished only for its shadow to return several minutes later in another material. The listener gradually stops waiting for recognizable songs and begins attending to density, distance, vibration and the way one sound changes the meaning of another simply by appearing beside it.

This method has deep roots in the musicians’ previous work, particularly Volcano the Bear’s habit of treating improvisation as raw material that can later be cut, layered and reorganized. The finished result can retain the unstable electricity of people reacting in real time while also acquiring the impossible transitions of collage. Amultamento 1&2 inhabits that fertile middle territory. It neither presents an untouched improvisation nor polishes every trace of spontaneity into formal composition. Human decisions remain audible in the seams. One can sense the pleasure of discovering that two events recorded at different moments suddenly speak to one another when placed side by side.

Amultamento 2 provides slightly larger chambers. Its central “PART ONE b” extends beyond six minutes, the longest individual digital section, allowing a particular environment more time to establish its own internal physics. This does not make the second record more conventional, but it changes the listener’s scale of attention. Instead of watching fragments collide, one begins noticing extremely gradual alterations within an apparently stable field: an electronic presence moving closer, an instrumental color becoming abrasive, a pulse revealing that it has been hiding inside what first seemed like drift. The two Amultamentos complement each other as compression and expansion, quick cellular change followed by longer stretches in which those cells appear to grow.

Daniel Padden’s brief guitar duet with Clarence Manuelo occupies a fascinating position inside this arrangement. Anyone familiar with Volcano the Bear may instinctively listen for the absent fourth member, only to have him materialize for less than a minute and disappear again. It is almost a miniature family reunion inserted into the new group’s developing language. The brevity keeps the appearance from becoming a nostalgic centerpiece. Padden does not arrive to restore an old identity; he passes through the music, leaves a mark and permits Amultamento to continue becoming itself.

Volcano the Bear emerged in Leicester during the mid-1990s from dissatisfaction with standard musical limitations, eventually developing a language that could accommodate free improvisation, folk fragments, Dada humor, post-punk abrasion, noise, ritual and surreal theatre. Mott, Moore and Manuelo therefore bring thirty years of shared instincts into this project, including the valuable ability to recognize when an accident has become a composition. Freer enters that history without being swallowed by it. His electronic vocabulary helps shift the center of gravity away from the idea of a band performing in a room and toward the image of several rooms, machines and time periods performing one another.

The title itself resembles a newly assembled word whose components have not completely surrendered their individual shapes. That is appropriate for music built from accumulation without uniformity. Amultamento does not melt its materials into a smooth alloy. It preserves differences: organic and synthetic, crude and delicate, antique and digital, comic and unsettling. The pleasure lies in hearing those incompatibilities negotiate temporary agreements. A trumpet does not need to blend politely with a machine hum. They merely need to occupy the same instant long enough for a third meaning to emerge between them.

The black-and-white cover makes a similar proposal. A large hand partly conceals or protects a succulent, while coarse halftone dots convert skin, plant and background into the same printable material. The hand may be tending the plant, examining it, shielding it or interrupting our view. That ambiguity suits a record concerned with touch, mediation and transformation. Natural growth is being handled by something unmistakably human, then translated into reproduction. The image is tactile and mechanical at once, much like music in which breath, metal, circuitry, machinery and editing remain distinguishable while becoming inseparable.

There is also something quietly generous about issuing this music as downloads, CD, cassette, conventional vinyl and clear lathe-cut records. Each format proposes a different relationship to its four twelve-minute forms. Digital indexing makes the internal joints visible; cassette restores uninterrupted sides; vinyl turns the structural symmetry into a physical ritual of lifting and turning; a lathe cut adds another layer of handmade irregularity. No single edition can claim to be the neutral container because this is music particularly sensitive to the surfaces and systems carrying it.

Amultamento 1&2 rewards the moment when identifying instruments becomes less important than observing their behavior. It asks not “What is making that sound?” but “What has that sound begun doing to the space around it?” Its abundance never feels like clutter for its own sake. Beneath the tractors, organ pipes, romantic drumpads and unspecified electronic wonders is a disciplined understanding of duration, contrast and placement. Four nearly perfect twelve-minute rectangles have been filled with material that refuses to travel in straight lines.

Anyone who has followed Volcano the Bear, Songs of Norway, Earthtrumpet, Aaron Moore’s solo work or You’re Alive But You Are Dead may recognize particular fingerprints and perhaps know more about the sessions, machines and mysterious Igenix contribution. Those details would be wonderful to gather. For a listener arriving without that history, Amultamento still functions as a complete little biosphere, a place where instruments have escaped their job descriptions and household objects are beginning to suspect that they have been musicians all along.