Crónica: Miguel A. García & Coeval: Laliguras

Paradox of the Estuary
Ulzion

More than in a river, the paradox of flow is found in the estuary. Its turbid waters, loaded with silt, sometimes advance, sometimes retreat, sometimes apparently stagnate in a false superficial stillness that hides deep currents and the tension of the clash between fresh and salty masses. A confusing and dense current that deposits a dark silt on the bottom loaded with strange, crackling, larval and bulbous life. Heraclitus, perhaps. Hegel, not at all. That is how we listen to the music offered by Miguel A. García in collaboration with Juan Carlos Blancas. Questioning the linear advance of time, these sounds, the fruit of a refined acoustic alchemy, develop in a cyclical manner: like tides.

Once linearity is eliminated, this would also be a diffuse cycle; diffuse because, even in a cycle, we find ourselves with a single meaning. Here it breaks and the meanings open. Before, after and sequentially? We could listen to it backwards and still enjoy it; or like a Guadiana river, that appears and disappears, springs to the surface and returns to the subsoil, it cannot be seen or heard, but it is latent.

A point is a perfect cycle where the beginning and the end are the same, dimensionless and omnidimensional. Perhaps, more accurately, we are faced with a vortex; apparently calm, but, at the same time, a generator of immense energy.

This music is made up of echoes of alternative futures and traces of unpublished pasts mixed in the elusive present of listening. But it is not a static and invariable work but absolutely mutant: full of nuances, progressions, regressions and contradictions.

Manipulating (as M.A.G. manipulates the sounds torn from reality by Juan Carlos Blancas) the famous phrase of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one could say “let nothing happen so that everything happens”.

The Devil Is in the Details
Àlex Reviriego

Perhaps nothing has influenced my evolution as a listener more than the understanding that variety is overrated. On a strictly rational level it seems easy to assimilate, but decades (and centuries) of conditioning have programmed our brains to react positively to development, climaxes, cheap thrills… change gives us an immediate mental satisfaction and exempts us from the need to work on our active attention. It is no coincidence that this is closely related to the developments of the early 21st century savage post-capitalist society, where the progressive increase in supply and the frantic movement of goods give us less and less margin for real decisions. Staring at the dozens of different types and brands of beer that line the shelves of my supermarket, I find myself increasingly forgetting my original intentions completely and entering a strange indecision mental loop, only to end up choosing based on discounts or just at random. A low voice in the back of my mind wonders if, after all, it wouldn’t be wiser just to stick to tap water.

Real revelations always have a physical component; without it, everything ends up a fragile mental construct that can easily collapse.

My mind was being slowly cleaned up by small but determined blows. I remember seeing a Niblock piece live and suddenly grasping the real meaning of the word “volume”. Discovering Transilvanian Hunger as a teenager and understanding that the first riff is timeless, repeating eternally, always the same but fascinating every single time. The static shots in Kitano’s early movies showed me how incredibly vulgar 90% of the audiovisual media I had seen up until that point was. Little blows that expand your world and sharpen your perception, revealing the superficiality of your previous gaze. All of them pointing in the same direction: limitation, far from being a deficiency, presents itself as an opportunity.

The apparent homogeneity of Laliguras forces us to focus on the details and fine-tune our gaze to unlock its secrets. Juan Carlos Blancas and Miguel A. García transform their limited materials into a labyrinth in which to hide their discoveries. Moments of singular beauty lie entangled between circular rhythmic patterns and layers of harsh digital distortion, while faint whispers lure us into the depths of the forest. A labyrinth without defined paths or neon signs indicating where to direct our listening. But as every kid who gets lost in the woods realizes, the more we lose our reference points, the clearer particular details become, and the sharper our senses. Just as every single tree starts to take on a particular personality, every rhythmic gesture, every reverb trail, every mysterious crackle reveals a fascinating little universe. We surrender to our intuition and keep walking, always forward.

And in the end, a clearing.

Unexpected.

Luminous.

Miguel A. García & CoevalLaliguras