T H E M U T E F O R T R E S S
CD / digital / re-released by Ferns Recordings in 2025
Francisco Meirino’s The Mute Fortress plays with the time and space of its sound materials.
He expands, unfolds and unwinds the ghostly voices that circulate in a jigsaw puzzle
of sequences that the mind assembles as it sees fit.
artwork : Pole Ka, CD layout by Francisco Meirino
Live picture - InaGRM
Assembled and mastered at Shiver Mobile, Lausanne, 2023-2024
Featured in Bandcamp’s best experimental albums of April 2024
Originally released as a cassette limited to 60 copies, by Vice de Forme in 2024
Clear cassette with silkscreened picture on a black Japanese envelope
C-40 - Only 60 copies - cassette edition is SOLD OUT
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R E V I E W S
on Bandcamp’s best experimental music of April 2024 by Marc Masters
Utilising the full stereo space in abstract music can sometimes be more a dazzling gimmick than a substantial move. But for Swiss artist Francisco Meirino, it’s a way to find new ideas and drive his music down different paths. During the two 20-minute sections of The Mute Fortress, Meirino’s sounds veer left to right, up and down, far away and close, but he never uses this spatial motion as a trick. He builds wordless narratives by spreading out noises, rattles, and static as overlapping motifs, with each section echoing what has come before. The Mute Fortress also works as a headphone album to get lost in, but what sticks for me is how far Meirino has journeyed sonically by album’s end.
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With regularity, there are new releases by Switzerland-based composer Francisco Meirino. He’s a musician working with electronic music, loving anything lo-fi and old; tape-recorders, near broken cables, electromagnetic hum, or electrical currents. I imagine him to be the field recordist staying home, working his way around the house, crawling around to find more buzzing wires hidden in the walls. I might be wrong, of course. On his recent album, ‘The Mute Fortress’, there are two pieces, part one and part two, and they last 19:56 and 19:44 minutes; no doubt recorded to be an LP release. In these pieces, Meirino does what he does best: creating a powerful collage of sound events, like the ones I just described. And a collage it is. Meirino builds a piece by breaking it down. Creating intricate cuts, jumping from one event to the next, is something he does best, more so in the first piece than the second. The second seemed more flowing, steadily rocking forward, more single-minded in the use of buzzing electrical sounds, and, ultimately, also the noisier brother of the two. The material seems more diverse in the first part, or maybe it only seemed so. Meirino is not a gentle soul; he likes his music to be dirty and loud, even in quiet moments. Meirino takes quite some time to explore something, loud or quiet, before moving on, but it is something radically different when he does. Ambient music it is not. It’s the kind of noise music that doesn’t deal with a barrage of noises, endless distortion, but with composition, knowing when to pull away, letting things die out, before bursting in another sound. Noise with some compositional consideration, along the lines of Joe Colley and the sadly missed Mika Vainio. It’s solid work, not his most outstanding achievement, and he never disappoints. Meirino’s music is a must listen for anyone tired of ‘true’ noise, wanting to hear something new. (FdW)
