Next month, Guanajuato-born, Mexico City/Berlin-based composer Concepción Huerta will release No Queda Nada, Todo Resuena via Signal Noise. The album, comprised of just two tracks, takes it’s title from An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, a book by British composer Daphne Oram which argued that sound functions as a form of memory. Huerta not only displays a deep appreciation of Oram’s work and legacy but attempts to actively builds upon it. “Electricity printed onto magnetic tape,” she explains. “It’s like photographic memory: materiality, light, and frequencies impregnated in the material. Memory as a signal that occurred in time.”
Only the recorded memory is not the same as the actual event. The very process of recording has its own influence over what is heard when the result is played back. Which is to say, just as the human body—our apparatus for recording and sharing memories—influences the information which it receives, stores and communicates, so too does the equipment performing the sonic equivalent. “Multitrack machines function here as extensions of the body and time,” as Huerta continues. “They are not neutral tools, but surfaces of friction where the signal wears away, duplicates itself, deviates.” Quite literally no queda nada, todo resuena. Nothing remains, everything resounds.
Listen to the album’s b-side, ‘Todo Resuena’, which evokes a sense of fractured, haunted physicality, below: