Supervolcano: An Eruption of Trans-Andean Noise
This record marks an encounter as spontaneous as it is unexpected between two seasoned figures of the Chilean and Argentine sound scenes. Both Óscar Santis and Francisco Ali-Brouchoud have long contributed—almost militantly, through multiple projects—to these niche communities devoted to experimentation and noise, rooted on either side of the Andes, with Valparaíso and Buenos Aires as their epicenters.
The material on this album stands as a clear testament to this ongoing crusade for two very specific reasons: first, it represents the duo’s only performance to date; and second, it was captured live at Estudio Libres, with a small audience sharing the recording space alongside the performers.
These circumstances highlight the importance of intuition, adrenaline, chance, synergy, and deep listening as key elements shaping the outcome of such experiences. Their presence is felt in the atmosphere of introspective tension, suffocating suspense, and explosive catharsis that punctuate the various moments of this free improvisation—later segmented into a series of tracks for this release.
The album title, “Supervolcán”, as well as those of each piece, conceptually allude to the planet’s major volcanic phenomena, particularly so-called “supervolcanoes”: which possess a magma chamber a thousand times larger than that of a conventional volcano and therefore produce gigantic eruptions capable of radically altering the environment where they occur. The sessions evoke fascinating sonic images linked to these geological beasts, which lie semi-dormant along the great Pacific Ring of Fire. The timbral characteristics and frequency range incorporated thus allow them to be easily associated with imagined events such as melting tectonic plates, volcanic radiation, pressurized geysers, rivers of boiling lava, the emission of flammable gases; or even, why not, drilling with heavy machinery, open-pit mega-mining, an environmental disaster in the Andean mountain range, or a hallucination caused by lithium fever.
Miguel Masllorens.
(Buenos Aires, Argentina. October 2025)
