Concepción Huerta + Liz Allbee - Sonitus #100

Sonitus has reached its 100th edition and that’s an occasion for something special. In the following weeks, we’ll announce the full lineup of four international projects. Now, meet the first one: the Mexican sound artist Concepción Huerta.
In Concepción Huerta’s work, sound is a means of representation and narration. Her last album El Sol de los Muertos proposes an image of magmatic currents as veins of Latin America; elsewhere, she is concerned with colonisation, pressure to perform or even an exiled star. Such an emphasis on narrativity or a “cinematic” effect in electronic/ambient music risks a dull literalness; but in Huerta’s compositions sound is allowed to remain ambiguous.
The Mexican multidisciplinary artist tends to have it both ways. Her sources comprise everyday sounds as well as synths, recorded to tapes and then processed, but also digital tools. The timbres and harmonies which emerge in this way are deeply mesmerising, yet there is a natural quality about them, as if they always lurked somewhere in your subconscious. And the compositions always hide as much as they show: lyrical noise, drone soundscapes punctuated by silence and a sense of dread underneath ambient meditations.

Line-up: Concepción Huerta