Son[i]a #322
Hugo Esquinca
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Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. Well beyond aesthetic judgements, more akin to the mind lock scene in THX 1138 than to an average listening experience. Yet Hugo’s mind lock is not only intended for the human listener – the chain of events and processes involved in his music are also being subjected to a quasi-seizure, brought to its very limits.
In fact, a good portion of Hugo’s work relies and revolves on the exploration of those fuzzy boundaries. Whether by testing the listener’s ability to process sonic density and amplitude, or by pushing down on the functional event horizon of whatever system he utilises (from computers to trusty cardioid microphones), Hugo’s live recordings, site-specific installations and recorded pieces are a constant celebration of that in-between, dream-like grey area, and the collapse that comes with it.
We talk to Hugo about his work and its ties to his upbringing – or how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to this fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.
Music by Hugo Esquinca, produced and conceived for this purpose. Co-produced by Lighthouse (Brighton). This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
Ji Youn Kang
Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism –often building up from slow to fast– and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, perfect 5ths and nature, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, Wave Field Synthesis, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sound artist Ji Youn Kang that we were unable to include the first time around.
José Luis Barrios Lara
The philosopher, art historian, curator and critic José Luis Barrios Lara reflects on the founding myth of the West, modernity, and the invention of the other. He considers identity politics as a political tool and a means for the management of bodies in space, questions the effectiveness of the epistemologies of the South, and interprets the global migration crisis as a form of neo-slavery. A grim scenario in which, he says, certain intersections of art and politics still have the power to destabilise the semantic field of representation and make room for the subversive.
EVOL
Roc Jiménez de Cisneros talks about EVOL’s very free deconstruction and reinterpretation of György Ligeti's 'Continuum' and Hanne Darboven’s 'Opus 17A', and how these works relate to the duo's current artistic practice. Unusual notions of time in relation to music, algorithmic reverse engineering, complexity through simplicity, anti-climax, ancient trance music, weird mental states and Dick Higgins’ Superboredom concept pop up in the conversation.
Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about SEMEFO
Interview with Mariana David and María Virginia Jaua about the artistic collective SEMEFO, which burst onto the Mexican scene in the early nineties with a proposal that explored the notion and implications of death by manipulating the corpse and its transformations.