Despertar, an acousmatic cycle.

Despertar (Awakening) is a compositional project in progress at the moment and it has been inspired by the social outburst in Chile last October 2019. Originally this project was conceived as a multi-channel acousmatic cycle, strongly driven by a narrative sense and with the following pieces: El peso de la Noche, Kiltro and Wünhelfe. In order to be achieved, it requires specific hardware that was supposed to be provided by the Arts Faculty of the Universidad Austral with additional equipment to be acquired through a funding already granted by the university. All of this, the work to be started at university’s facilities and the addition of new equipment has been postponed due to the pandemic. At the same time, there is a sort of symbolic freezing for the conceptual compositional outcome expected: three pieces inspired and reflecting on the social outburst in my country. However, there is one piece already finished which has two formats, stereo and octophonic, 8’43” long and entitled El peso de la Noche (2019), which programme notes are:

There is a night in Chile which is a mantle that numbs the spirit, a historical idea, a notion coined cynically by 19th century Chilean politician Diego Portales: el peso de la noche (the weight of the night). It is a metaphor of great masses’ abulia who do not take possession of democracy. We must wake up!

Because of the health contingency, it is very difficult to carry the composition of the rest works, at least in their multi-channel format. The two additional compositions, Lamento (2020) and Suspensión & Fragmentación (2020), where not included in the original plan for the cycle and are only stereo and were created as medium to continue the creative ethos and inspiration of these ideas, allowing to canalize the compositional flow. These pieces, constituting a sort of trilogy, were composed according, more or less, to the following guidelines:

• Compose as much as possible in stereo format.
• To transfer the actual freezing/pausing of the project to concrete sonic procedures such as spectral freezing, deceleration of pace and a general sense of calm sonic behaviours.
• To add specific audio treatments such as extreme filtering, time stretching, extreme reverberation and spectral spatialization in order to play expressively with aural materials reflecting on the notions of vanishing, erasing and overwriting.

These concepts in relation with the notion concealment and pause, due to the pandemic, of social claims, evidence of social injustices and ideals of overcoming them. In this context, I am expecting to work with materials already prepared as sound palette for the cycle and other sound objects such as previous pieces and mainly archive and field recordings. Finally, this sonic word consisting of various acousmatic pieces, can be presented as individual works or as superimposed on each other in a free manner by the composer, an acousmatic performer or a curator in concerts, streaming platforms or exhibitions.