RELEASE DATE: FEB 6 on all digital listening platforms
LINE presents Displacements, the debut album from Mexican sound artist, essayist, and composer, Jorge Solís Arenazas.
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For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the relations between language, chaotic systems, and the randomness inherent in discrete magnitudes. How is it that stable codes can assimilate accidents and unpredictable behaviors? How do small yet persistent variations give rise to structures of meaning? In what ways can language remain plastic enough to build upon stimuli —whether chaotic or tending toward randomness— in order to create new spatial relationships?
Displacements emerged from these reflections. It assembles pieces created by manipulating materials often regarded as «unmusical», from which I shaped textures, rhythmic patterns, layers of uncontrolled events, and harmonic phenomena based on their spectral density. The process itself resembled a pendular motion, a continuous displacement between two poles. On one hand, the notion of uncertainty and vulnerability in the face of uncontrollable events; on the other, the sense of apparent stability that arises when deeper structures of listening and memory come to the surface—structures that are strictly speaking cultural markers, both material and symbolic prints, extending beyond any personal sphere, even if we encounter them only through personal choices. Although their emergence is rarely sudden, aren’t these forces fundamentally comparable to fleeting accidents in the sense that they, too, escape our control?
Displacements is a journey through various ranges of the audible frequency spectrum. Both versions of Anabasis —taken from the Greek word for ascension— are composed mainly of feedback recordings and focus on the upper frequency range. Catabasis —a journey of descent— originates in red or brownian noises, moving through lower frequencies. Eschatia—the edge of the exterior, a frontier or border to even time— is an exploration between two lands, an interlude in the voyage, making use of different synthesizers for the tonal layers and recovering residues of rhythmic structures created with modular synthesis.
— JORGE SOLÍS ARENAZAS
