As Microhm, Garcia focuses on the immersive capacities of sound art. curvature, a joint EP with producer Rogelio Sosa, released earlier this year, is a dense, dense collection of ambient tracks about artistic intuition. Last year Foam in space time, an experimental EP produced with modular synths, elevated elements of ’80s new wave and ambient into a “narrative exploration of the intricate theories of quantum physics, time travel and black holes”. At the height of the global pandemic, she used Markov chains, a stochastic method for modeling probability, to compose the 2020s Endless uncertainty EP. In keeping with her creative spirit, she used algorithmic probabilities to generate melody and rhythm as part of the composition process—literally harnessing the uncertainty of the present and future in song form.
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As Ezmeralda, Nicolás Vallejo creates his own kind of weak poetics of Colombian life. After messing around with effects pedals and slowing down cumbia beats in the late 2010s, he released his debut solo album, Intangible inheritance from nowhere, last year. On it, his ambient cumbia dreams explore states of alert consciousness and soothing torture, rendered through delay machines, reverb and tape.
On “Children Floating in the Sky,” a track from his 2022 EP In flying atmospheres, the voice of a gamín, a poor boy living on the streets of a Colombian city in the late 90s, is filtered through a flood of reverb. Meanwhile, on “Duelo (Cumbia del Fantasma),” a muffled tambora drum beats slow and scattered, jolting under the strum of a sinister guacharaca, the instrument that forms cumbia’s rhythmic backbone. It’s languid and spectral, something close to a cumbia rebajada beat, but rooted in an ambient sensibility. The effect is melancholic, resembling a colonial lament, or a soft protest song about contemporary forms of injustice in Colombia.
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Dominican producer Alina Labor may only be 25 years old, but her music possesses emotional poignancy beyond her years. Her debut EP Strange sounds from the moon, released when she was 17, was partly a way to mourn the accidental death of her mother when she was young. But it also reflected the self-taught artist’s teenage discovery of shoegaze and dream pop; in an email, she says these genres helped her “process the pain and pleasure of living in this complex yet magical universe.”
