QOA: Sauco review – electro-acoustic jewels incorporate the sounds of nature

Musicians have long tried to incorporate the sounds of nature into their compositions. Think of Olivier Messiaen or Ottorino Respighi transcribing birdsong and arranging it for orchestra, George Crumb’s whale music, the percussionists of the Congo basin, making complex polyrhythms from splashing river surfaces, or Trilok Gurtu immersing his drums and cymbals into buckets of water.

Composer Nina Corti, AKA QOA, is the latest musician to work in this area. Now based in Los Angeles, she makes electro-acoustic music inspired by the flora and fauna of her native Argentina – the album takes its name from the Spanish word for elderberries, and there are tracks named after breeds of butterfly, native herbs, marsh deer, lichen, fungi and a variety of honey from the Misiones region.

This could all get a bit soporific and new agey, but Conti’s music embraces nature in a pleasingly random way. Sauco is a slightly insane collage: the disorderly rhythms of waterfalls; the slowly mutating ostinato trills of birdsong; the whooping of forest animals; the pulse of animal heartbeats. The title track is a lovely synthetic jewel suspended in amniotic fluid, featuring babbling brooks and the chirrup of jungle insects. Liquen is a symphony of dripping water and synth drones. Yatei features pentatonic riffs trickling like a mountain stream. Senna, with its slowly unfolding drones, is as close as we get to meditation music; for contrast it’s followed by Anartia and Zafiro del Talar, all galloping tribal drums, martial synth riffs and rave-like samples. But QOA is more comfortable making quiet, arrhythmic beauty from the most arbitrary areas of nature’s sonic universe.

Also out this month

Rectangles and Circumstance (Nonesuch) sees the Pulitzer prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw singing new songs inspired by 19th-century poetry, accompanied by Sō Percussion. Once you get over Shaw’s rather blank RP mezzosoprano and the intrusive beats, some of this is quite haunting: in particular the wineglass drones of the Gertrude Stein-influenced And So, the vibraphone-assisted waltz The Parting Glass and the wonderfully jerky Like a Drum. Disconnect (Phantom Limb) sees the Kenya-born, Berlin-based artist KMRU team up with Kevin Richard Martin – AKA KRM, AKA the Bug – to make a piece of faintly terrifying drone-based music, featuring lots of creaky sounds and discordant mumbling. Tashi Wada’s debut album What Is Not Strange? (RVNG Intl) features his partner, Julia Holter, on several tracks (the pleasingly baroque Grand Trine appears to be a hymn to their child) but other tracks seem more inspired by the spirit of his father, Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada, exploring microtonal minimalism, wobbly synths, mutating drones and field recordings.