JESÚS ANTONIO VERGARA
There is always something special about tracks that were made of field recordings. Sometimes it is just the moment you recognize the original sounds that makes you happy but sometimes the tracks engrosses you, so you find yourself in a soundworld that takes you on a journey you don´t want to miss. Well, Jesús Vergara from Mexico does exactly that.
The title track is a massive piece of music and a statement of an Mexican artist, who has to tell a story worth listening to. If you want to find out more about the background of the album, you can read further below in the artist text, but you also can search for hints in the artwork.
Tegh from Iran did a remix for the B Side of the tape, that takes the track further into songstructures without loosing the original field recordings storyline.
The tapes are limited to 50 copies. We used smoothe cardboard for the o-cards and blue shells for the tapes. The tapes feature white onbody prints on both sides.
JESÚS ANTONIO VERGARA ABOUT HIS WORK
R.D.A. was first presented as an art installation at festival santa lucia in Monterrey, MX, 2018. It is composed out of field recordings made in Monterrey, various audios from local tv shows, and a lot of sound manipulation in an effort to reclaim beauty out of the city, where a crude popular culture and deeply rooted traditions had never allowed me a true sense of pride or belonging.
The audio sources for R.D.A. were recorded during a long derivé performance. The practice of walking aimlessly through a place in order to submerge deep into its particular experience. This performance aimed at trying to shock my initial rejection towards the city I live in and see if I was able to capture part of its essence.
Other audio sources were taken from prominent local tv shows broadcasted at the time of the performance. they were all then manipulated to create the final result. The derivé allowed for a new and more personal experience of the city’s downtown, it brought up a particular experience that i understood as its personality.
As I was reflecting upon this experience, a couple of days afterward, I found a very interesting research paper about the possibility of memory transfer between two sea slugs (aplysias). This paper detailed how by conditioning one of the subjects until its reaction behaviors changed, and then transplanting some of its brain RNA to a non-conditioned subject, appeared to transfer the first’s conditioned behaviors into the second. A lot of questions arise. What is it that it’s being transferred? The conditioning altered chemical compounds that create the new behavior? Or the information or more abstract experience itself that renders this new behavior possible? The research offered no answer.
A much more clear split between the physical and experience was underlined by all this. it appears as if the physical elements create change, but the most interesting part for me, the lived experience doesn’t seem to be found anywhere. For me, the true, circular experience, with all its nuances and complexities is necessarily a deeply personal one.
This is the point that I aimed at while creating this piece. To create something so abstract out of the more concrete, to rarify the familiar until the point of being unrecognizable, because, if we could make someone else live our own experience of some familiar thing (like a city) how else could it appear to them other than a completely alien thing?
Within the tape and/or digital release, listeners can find certain clues placed somewhere within the artwork that, when deciphered, would lead them to a hidden website where the main references are cleared and a written meditation of the piece’s concept is shown.
1. R Derive Aplysia 26:02
2. Altaer 13:28
3. Drive Aplysia (Tegh Remix) 08:32
