“On her back over distances rode not even a bird.”
(Liliana Herrero, Confesiones del viento)“When we look in our environment for the elements that can condition or enhance our character, the ways of bonding, the ways of our expression, we usually fix our eyes, our feelings and think about the earth that we tread, that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Its geographical features, its colors and textures. The species that thrive in the conditions that it positions before us. More difficult is to account for how the air defines us. Being an invisible matter and much less tangible than a piece of rock, to think of ourselves surrounded by that elastic medium and to meditate the consequences of that immersion is less probable. How is it that the air that surrounds Inti every day from the place on the planet where she decided (or not) to situate herself, to dwell and create, conditions and enhances her art? ‘Gran Madre’ (pn143) invites me to that exercise.
In the habitable dimension presented by the three tracks that are part of this release, I can immerse myself in that perception and reflect on the air in a vast spectrum. Thus a breeze appears in the form of her voice, to which she decides to tie the rest of the materials that she sonically molds. Sometimes she brings words, at others only tonalities that tighten and loosen the link with the electronic textures but that never try to impose their meaning and their ‘humanity’. From breeze to wind there are degrees of atmospheric pressure where the air is agitated and charged, in this case, dust and static. At various moments along the path that ‘Rea’ or ‘Mina’ lay out, it is this abrasiveness of the particles in suspension that defines the atmosphere, stripped of all dew, open to the sparks and micro-lightning so common when the air has 0% humidity. Mediating its duration, ‘Mina’ displays the sound of rain. But there is no indication of freshness or relief in its appearance, instead it makes the electricity even more palpable (and the added risk of walking through that sound space with feet bare and wet). What threats do those bursts of electronic static that shake the environment carry?
Every so often, as in that pulsating drum at the end of ‘Rea’, I think I’m listening to the radioactivity measurement of a Geiger counter. It is not clean air or purity that seems to matter to Inti and contamination can be felt here as a concept distilled from its negative connotations. Here we breathe strange and invisible agents that will inevitably modify our genetic constitution. Interestingly, I do not perceive an imposition in this action. This possibility is attractive, like a storm in the desert that advances towards us as we wish it to engulf us. Sand that hugs.
Already fused in these volatile molecules, ‘Ciprés (Cypress)’ arrives and the air becomes a whirlpool. We recover our body and integrity to be transported to a time that is not today or here, inhabited by ghosts. An old lament, a couplet, an epic of distance that reminds me of the pain of being separated from that which surrounds me.
So the air and its molecules that compress and expand to shake our eardrums. So the wind, now carrying seeds, now turning poplars. So is the atmosphere of this disc and this geographical and poetic site where Inti is planted to capture the ether and materialize its language.
In this edition, which is undoubtedly an artistic action in itself, for the beloved and respected Pueblo Nuevo label, a valuable Chilean publishing project, Inti plays with the air as well, investing the operation of the dry Argentinian winds. Then the mass of arid and rough air, decides for once to follow the Great Mother Son on its trajectory. Returning over her steps, she climbs the mountain range to look for the baggage of freshness and humidity that she hid there, to return to the sea that saw her leave once.”
j.crowe
(Tunuyán, Argentina. Julio / July 2019)
