“I would like to make a Book that upsets men, that is like an open door and that leads them where they would never have consented to go, simply a door facing Reality.” – Artaud, Antonin. “El Ombligo de los Limbos/El pesa-nervios / The Navel of Limbos/The Nerve-weigher” (1925).

“How can you make the sound of a drop of water with synthesis…” – Maybe I could explain it employing academia, university knowledge or with the aid of YouTube or Wikipedia, but the truth is that I don’t know… for me sound is magic, from how it is produced to the manner through which it reaches our neurons, from how an apparatus plugged into an electrical current is capable of sounding like a musical instrument to how a turntable functions… and what can be said of digital sound… that It’s already black magic, magic-bits, magic-magic. But that question formulated by Ben (Bridet) in one of the first meetings in Sebastián Herrera‘s workshop, was the starting point of a sequence of random events that finally materialized in what you will hear in approximately 25 minutes, when you open (the) “Portal”, or even open the mind/ears to the journey that this sound convenes.

Like the Skylab offering its last signs of life before rushing into the Australian desert, Sebastián’s proposal starts with sounds from space, satellites, shooting stars, descending glissandos, and then begins a route accompanied by a constant beat, which secretly propels us towards different rhythmic environments, all of it growing until it ends in a brief pause in the middle of the track where synthetic sounds and percussions emerge between clouds of feedback delays, to then approach the final part with short and aggressive sound apparitions and impulses, repetitive and mechanical, accompanied by ghostly trumpets of the apocalypse announcing the final fall/ascension.

Welcome to the world of sound Sebastián, you discovered a half-open portal and you dared to cross it, with the compass of sensitivity and curiosity, well wrapped up, you opened a path with no turning back.

Mika Martini
(Santiago, Chile. Junio / June 2022)