Minimal Aggression

+ Recordings

NY-based, Colombian composer and pianist Julián De La Chica, and Costa Rican composer, writer and musicologist, Susan Campos-Fonseca, PhD (Casa de las Américas Prize 2012), present in the album Minimal Aggression a mutual ‘interrogation’ of minimalism, its possibilities, and its trajectory in the 21st century. This album can be seen as a first "Manifesto" and as an artistic research, where two worlds converge: independent creation (De La Chica), and academic thinking (Campos-Fonseca).

Minimal Aggression

Artists: Various

Composer:

Julián De La Chica &
Susan Campos-Fonseca

Lyric: Various

Format: Album
Release: Sep 18, 2015
Catalogue: IGM-005
GTIN/EAN/UPC: 4050215144378
Producer: Irreverence Group Music

​Tracks

Mandala, VI poems by Susan Campos-Fonseca

01. Poem No.1
02. Poem No.2
03. Poem No.3
04. Poem No.4
05. Poem No.5  (Human Number)
06. Poem No.6  (Tritono)

Beauty, Death songs

07. No. 1 - Prologue
08. No. 2 - Yo no soy rubia
09. No. 3 - Snow white
10. No. 4 - She knows
11. No. 5 - Epilogue

Butoh Meditations

12. No. 1 - Katana
13. No. 2 - Espino blanco
14. No. 3 - Prophecy (Profecía de los trenes y los almendros muertos)

Susan Campos Fonseca
Photo by Hassan Malik

Album Notes
—

It is a "Manifesto" and a “research project" because both creators reflect on the challenges of choosing to be a “minimalist" today. Talking about vanguard art and transgression is something completely historical. The burden of historicism poured over the creative act is, perhaps, one of the greatest tests for a composer today. If you are a creator of sound, you're in historical perspective. The works gathered here choose Minimalism as a possibility for an ascetic journey, where musical materials can be reduced to a minimal structure, exploring the tension between sound and noise. Within this search, Noise and Poetry become articulative axes.

This project brings together the Costa Rican sound artist Alejandro Sánchez Núñez, and the poems of Elise Plain, Juan Andrés García Román, Marco Aguilar Sanabria and Susan Campos-Fonseca. Exploring the boundaries between music and Noise, sound and word, organic and cybernetic body, singing Human and "inner jungle," the album counts with the voice of Ana Echandi, Martha Mooke’s Viola, and Alex Sterling’s Sound engineering. Dystopia of desire that “pricks” asceticism ... as in the "Aggression" summarized by Frida Kahlo in her "A Few Small Nips" of 1935, showing the murder of a woman. The lover stabbed to death, says in his defense a phrase that crowns the work: "... but it was but a few small nips." The accuracy of this expression summarizes Minimal Aggression.

Susan Campos - Fonseca, PhD
Musicologist and composer

Martha Mooke
Photo by Hassan Malik

“Julián De La Chica and Susan Campos-Fonseca explore the minimal act of sound which travels without pretension, ascetic, going abyss. This is an act of resistance, “Nips” in a saturated society where “everything feels” where we drown in the “everything possible”, empty.”

— Susan Campos - Fonseca

Video
—

Behind the Scenes

“Rastro de betún añejo. Alfileres relucientes que titilan. Aullidos en OFF. El hielo se quiebra con sonidos serpenteantes. Nudo de misterio obligado. Iteración mórbida”

— Otto Castro - Composer

Video
—

Julián De La Chica
Katana (From Butoh Meditations)
Music by Susan Campos-Fonseca
—

“¿Podemos imaginar un trazo más revelador que aquel que renuncia al histrionismo y a la gesticulación en favor de una expresividad más honda y sencilla? ¿Una sola linea viva, vibrante y líquida? ¿Una linea que contenga la espuma del mar? He aquí el empeño.”

— Juan Barrero, Film director (notes about the album)

Credits
—

Susan Campos - Fonseca
Photo by Hassan Malik

Produced by Irreverence Group Music
Music by Susan Campos - Fonseca and
Julián De La Chica​

Artists: Various​

Mandala, Recorded by Richard Rozen
at Richard Rozen Studio in Brooklyn, NY
Mixed and mastered by Alex Sterling
at Precision Sound Studios in New York, NY
Beauty, Death Songs & Butoh Meditations
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Alex Sterling
at Precision Sound Studios in New York, NY

​Poems by Susan Campos - Fonseca (Mandala);
Elise Plain, Juan Andrés García Román
(Beauty, Death Songs); Marco Aguilar-Sanabria
(“profecía”, Butoh Meditations)

Album Notes by Susan Campos - Fonseca
Art cover by Jenny Odio
Booklet by Lina Gracia
Photography by Hassan Malik

​Julián De La Chica’s music is published
by Vagabundo Music Publishing, Inc. (BMI)
Susan Campos - Fonseca (BMI)
Manufactured & marketed by
Irreverence Group Music (Brooklyn, NY)
Made in US. Total time: 60 min
Ⓟ and Ⓒ 2015 IGM