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LINER NOTES
Musical gestures come to life and evolve in Álvaro Domene’s ‘Torsion’. From superimpositions of dense polyrhythms, interlocked scale shifts, to sonics as strata and atmospheric layerings: there is an orientation to overall structures and a simultaneous intense focus on local texture and timbre, a curiosity for micro kernels of motifs and phrases which then give way, scale shifting and voiced by the guitar, to joyous, raging, leaping legatos across a complex percussive soundscape, and then again to vaster, orchestrally textured landscapes.
Conceptually, what drives this project? Is it concerned, as one title suggests, with the erosion of sound? Or the erosion of the tools of sound, leading to a collapse and fusion between systems? The pillars of ostinato and recognizable, partly stable rhythms undergird a cloud of unknowing, a reverse labyrinth in registers above. The guitarist’s mind splits and flies mercurial across the other passages of this labyrinth. Textures grained in foreground and farther away, immersive, all clamor for attention: overlapping syntagmas of rhythm and timbre. Pure pleasure of sound and musical formalisms. And cognition in flux.
Domene explores syntax using what he calls ‘certain gestures’ which might lead to an ‘evolution of cognition’- on the part of the player as well as the listener. There is a tension built in as well between the guitarist as programmer, as engineer of rhythm and metric: and the guitarist as pure improviser. Domene says that he is interested in parameter related agency, in testing the boundaries to generate spontaneous material, and in the elasticity of improvisatory languages. These concerns all point to a larger meta-compositional strategy which aims at a renovation of attentional focus- on our part as listeners, and also on the musicians’ part as they negotiate the complex and only partly predictable rhythm underpinnings of the music. If as Domene says, “this music is in part about the metaphor of a consensus based decision making process between the drum synthesizer and I to generate musical ideas”, then the consensus is akin to ‘human in the loop’ processes we see increasingly with AI and machine-learning enhanced art and science.
Thus another one of the end goals of this form of music making would be to negotiate not only the ‘human to human’ aspects of musicking, but also the human to machine interfaces. If cognition is rebooted by the process, it is not only ours as listeners. Implicitly, a machine cognition is formed and inflected.
It’s a wind-up, the torqued intensity of the guitar tone arcing and layering: and hovering high above the tectonics of the system we can perceive a cellular automata of sound, outlined by the crystal matrices of the percussion. Attention shifts across the interlocked grooves and islands, new definitive phrases establish a psycho-acoustics of morphemes resequenced- the breakdown of grooves giving way to a different thought process- a euphoric celebration & unification of mind which then diffuses back out into open space, delicate percussions… and the void from whence it came.
In one’s memory, the bass ostinatos and substructures of music continue, as we walk across a burning desert, small pieces of metal chiming in our garments… the wind evoking voices and distortions in the Eleusinian spaces the music provokes. Rich textures of mind proceed from these meshworks.
Why strive for this in sound? Presumably, again: to lead to a different mode of agency, and of mind. Domene makes music contributing to an extension of the sonic lexicon, and sees the chance for what he calls ‘expanded options through morphological freedom.’ Morphological freedom refers to the possibility that mind and self might be mobile, fluid- that the form we currently adopt is not the only and limiting form. There is a radical kind of equality we might envision through the ethics of a world building project driven by curiosity and love- love for sound, for formal structure, and for awareness.
‘Thinking no-thing, will limited self unlimit.’ Zen sutra
The gambit here is that these emergent sonic morphologies will lead to that ethology. This is, as Bateson put it, a step to an ‘ecology of mind’. If some form of transhumanism could emerge from Domene’s project, it might be one that wants, needs, demands and loves sound- and includes sonics as part of a deeply embedded mode of thinking and being. Can we imagine ‘being’ without sound? Perhaps we can, but absence of sound for us is a ‘void of being’- and in contrast: in the mind that evolves from Domene’s project, the World is Sound.
-Ed Keller
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