Laonikos speaks to Aaron Holloway-Nahum (@aaronhnahum) about Riot Ensemble (@riotensmble) and new music today, from the challenges of programming a concert to what it means to have one's work recognised.

The music you're hearing is "The Geometry of Clouds" by Aaron Holloway-Nahum, in a rehearsal by Adam Swayne (piano), @marieschreer (violin), Stephen Upshaw (viola) and @louise-mcmonagle (cello) at Wigmore Hall in February 2021.

View the full performance from Riot Ensemble's debut concert at Wigmore Hall here: Our performance (Riot) available still on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UsBwZJ0LrEU

Photograph by Aaron Holloway-Nahum (Feb 16 2021, Wigmore Hall)

The Geometry of Clouds

#1 Aaron Holloway-Nahum and Riot Ensemble | The Sampler Audiozine

〜 Taken from Debit's album 'The Long Count', out via Modern Love on Feb 18th 2022 〜

Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released EP “SYSTEM” harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. 

On “The Long Count”, the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane.

“The Long Count” is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments – whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets – using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music.

The ten tracks of ‘The Long Count’ form a ritual that’s a few footsteps out of time – neither a part of our present, nor the past. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance.

Beatriz’s soundscapes are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, and are as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner. Her microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images, while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that’s all too rare. Although “The Long Count” was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA – an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations.

File under magick concrète.

All tracks written, produced & mixed by Delia Beatriz
Additional Machine Learning for Audio by Isomov
Mastering by Rashad Becker
Album Art Photography & Creative Direction by Debit
AI Album Art by Moisés Horta Valenzuela

The Long Count

Debit - 2nd Day

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#1 Aaron Holloway-Nahum and Riot Ensemble | The Sampler Audiozine

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