Crónica is proud to present the fifth installment in the Product series with works by Freiband and Boca Raton. Freiband's "Replay" and Boca Raton's "Crop." are a pair of superb live-recordings made on March 25th 2004 at the Muziekcentrum as part of the Earational 2004 festival for electronic music and audio-art, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands.
Early 2004 Freiband was invited by the Earational festival to play a new piece based on the first CD 'Microbes'. When that was released everybody thought this to be the 'first laptop album' by Frans de Waard, but in fact it's the last 'non laptop album'. In the early days of Freiband, concerts were loosely based on sounds from the 'Microbes' album, played from mini discs and CDRs. To take the album onto the laptop was indeed a challenge, but in hindsight it proved to be the best concert by Freiband ever. Taking the small detailed micro-sounds, placing them in a new context add a lot of tension and new depths to the original material.
Boca Raton's piece performed at Earational 2004 is the result of a series of experiments on Quadraphony and composing along it's six axes. On micro, meso and macro-level, the composition contains circulating or propelling sound, both in it's wave-shape as in it's structure over time.

"Freiband had a nice techno sounding concert in Athens/Greece few days ago, on 11.march at the so called Masynergy diy festival, where also few other quite interesting Greek artists played. There I was told that this 3"EP '{flying}' is actually a cover/rework/remix of a track called 'Flying' which is the only instrumental song by The Beatles. Unfortunally I haven't heard the original song, but perhaps this is one of those cases when there is no obvious similarity between the original and the remix at all, like, for example, Fennesz's remix of the track 'Paint it black' by The Rolling Stones. Or, like Freiband's own tribute to Joy Division's producer Martin Hannett by making music with sounds taken from their songs of the album 'Unknown Pleasures'. Well, something like that. What's a similarity in remixing anyway? The sound of this 20min EP with 8 tracks is mostly in some grainy atmospheric contemporary ambient areas, sometimes vaguely loop-based, which actually reminds of Goem. That's something to be noted, the borders between Goem and Freiband are slowly melting when Frans fuses them altogether in an amusing combination, which was specially obvious on his Athens' concert where he played as 'Freiband plays Goem'. Talking about that, it's similar to Atom Tm sounding more and more like Senor Coconut's latino style on the recent releases. With it's sound '{flying}' can be compared to Fennesz's grainy ambient or to Jim O'Rourke's subtle improv styles. Actually, for now there's no need to listen the original song by The Beatles, this is fine just as it is. Packed in a great shiny-happy cover and cd design which goes well along with these short untitled ambient crackling tribute drones. Enjoy the melodic sunshine." [Boban Ristevski - Vital Weekly 466]