I am going to think of this text as if it was a new sound work, and it is similarly confusing to define the beginning of it all: Taking each word as if it was a meaningless source of sound, because words say and that does not work for me at all.

Shhh, listen. I always come back. I search around things that already happened even though I invent them. All my production has a blurry connection with a past that I choose from all the pasts.

There is a quote from Labelle that, no matter how many times I repeat it, I can’t seem to grasp: “Where do sounds come from and where do they go?”

What does sound connect with?

Our productions have the unmistakable timbre of inheritance. All genres are inherited, all images borrowed, all sounds remind us of something. The relationship we build with the past is continuously forgotten, but not without first leaving a reflex to dodge foreign constructions. And my relationship connects with the desert.

I read that in the 13th century, Marco Polo mentioned that dunes could sing and attributed it to the magical spirits of the desert —“at times fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms”—. Those were sounds and noises. The explorers heard them and didn’t know where they came from, but they knew what they were. I only hope to have inherited those noises.

The ubiquity of sound allows us to connect towards all these directions and gives us the possibility to lie about its origins, such is our reflex. Sounds are like spirits, resembling thousands of stories overlapping, unfolding and told in unison.

The past is an Argentinian desert. When I start working on a piece I search everywhere,deep down. There is a picture. A text. The daily news. I leave silence open to build an imaginary sound construct that comes in that way... like a gust, almost unnoticed, without understanding where it comes from.

Note: I’m working on a commissioned cello solo piece,

and I am searching for something in a rather unknown Sonic Youth album

a thing they did for a road movie along the Californian desert

(that is the image).

I think I will do a sort of cover of S. Y. or something that has the atmosphere of this

album,

because I have always liked this album,

and because my last work sounds too much like work and I want it to sound like

something else.

Space is the transited place, the inhabited place. The sound of the wind seems to be the only one inhabiting the desert; it transits it and transforms it into space, continuously defining until it disappears and there is silence. The feeling we are not there is inevitable, we are deafened, we are unable to sound, we are only spectators, we are only listeners. In the desert we can only be a Marco Polo. The desert has no places, it is just a big full space.

What does the desert connect with?

How much place do sounds theretake?

Present migrations seem to have arrived with the dust, not by water. The wind is the same and its sound seems to have never found its limit. Noise was inherited. Noise became the Zonda wind: an extremely hot and dry wind that occurs in the desert region of Argentina, in Mazán, where my grandma grew up. She was the daughter of Syrian immigrants and used to tell me that the wind was unbearable during naptime, its noise sometimes confounding with the silence of the village. It was immense, so wide it stunned and transformed people. Ubiquity is evil and always sends us back to the beginning. Noise is, by chance, a disarray and wind is a flux. It has a direction and it is suddenly everywhere, says Serres.

The acoustic dimensions of the desert are the biggest ever imagined. The aurality proposed by a limitless territory is tricky, so the listener is the one that builds borders, acoustic frontiers—perceived or invented— to survive, because physical limits are essentially visual concepts and we don’t even have that here. We never find an echo and we are scarred because we can’t see ourselves.

note: I once drafted a choral piece called Zonda, nothing came out…

I’ve just finished another choral work too,

it’s about wikileaks or something like that, something not very personal.

Another time I made a piece for clarinet and electronics

Named Damasco… I didn’t finish it either, but I made a list of things:

wind

white

a lot of noise

earth

tea

a lot of silence

hidden

dry

fabrics

j

The blurry connection between the desert and my work has always been evident. It resounds dry as the sound of a distant dog in a summer night, but that it’s never seen, such as the past we forget that keeps us in a permanent and necessary confusion. I only recognize some textures, some shapes, the evil, the fragility of the concept of “time” which I never dare to deal with. I see big dunes… the need for an eternal contemplation of a sound without borders. And the irruption of noise. The irruption that reminds us we are always there to listen and there is nothing else left to do.

note: my teacher and I talked a lot about shapes and time

He once made me guess how many minutes the elevator took to reach his studio

Two exact minutes.

We spoke about the weather and how it can influence our music.

I remember I told him about Mazán.

He recommended me an Argentinian film… something in the desert, something about a funeral in a

desert.

I never remembered its name.

I never found the film…

And now Mariano is gone and I can’t ask him.

Silence is indivisible, just as the desert. Time is divisible only if it’s filled it with stuff. There is a quality in sound that enables doubt and it is more powerful than any visual persuasion, as long as we have a place to save ourselves in sound. Within noise lies the most primal possibility to build from scratch.

 

Editado en Autogenesis

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