Rifts + Light by Quintelium + Lalén Ríos Luna

Lalén Ríos Luna and Quintelium collaborated in Rifts + Light during the last three months of 2023. This is collaboration takes root in California’s Central Valley. Chiasmic music in which the identities of the two artists get crossed, mixed and confused, to produce a different sound which cannot be readily identified with their most characteristic work to date. Quintelium has been making sublime ambient soundscapes, most notably in the recent release Moon Waves (out on Ephem-Aural. 2023). Lalén Ríos Luna’s sound has tended toward the jarring juxtaposition of noises, cut ups, and field recordings (exclusively on this Porous Collective Bandcamp site). But these tracks are an uncompromising blend of seemingly antithetical aesthetics. The result is what might be called maximalist ambient, a contradiction in terms, a paradoxical union of opposites, which we will let stand nevertheless. Perhaps the biggest difference from the ambient form, however, is that this music almost requires a listener that yields to it as to a meditative state in which the ear is allowed to track the flow of sound. This kind of meditative attention goes counter to the non-obtrusive goal of ambient music. Yet there is a kinship in the way that time or rhythm dissolves into more irregular or granular form.

Hailing from California’s Central Valley, Rifts + Light is Quintelium’s first collaboration with another artist, and his first foray into slightly noisier territory. Quintelium’s usual drones are augmented on Rifts + Light by his and Lalen Rios Luna’s own static-like and often abrasive textures. As always, the music aims for a kind of subtle view into reality, into spaces rarely glimpsed. Into rifts and light, if you will.

First an archive of Michigan improvisers, now a metaphor for the many/others that is the self. Lalén, Caeiro and Xeno are heteronyms, in Pessoa’s sense. Their vocation is electroacoustic, experimental, improvisation. Sound art that sometimes lies beyond what some call music. Ultimately, the fundamental work behind these recordings is to precariously ground unground existence in the doing. Peace.

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