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Susan Campos—Fonseca:
Espino Blanco [10th Anniversary]

Release: Aug, 2025

Irreverence Group Music [IGM] proudly presents the live recording of Campos—Fonseca’s La Creación sin Mañana, marking its second performance.

Originally commissioned in 2021 by Alejandro Gutiérrez—Mena, principal conductor of the University of Costa Rica Symphony Orchestra (OSUCR), and harpsichordist María Clara Vargas—Cullell, La Creación sin Mañana was composed for harpsichord with a Noise Machine (soloist), two trumpets, four horns, piano, string orchestra, and percussion ensemble. Conceived in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the work premiered at the National Theater of Costa Rica on August 9, 2021, and was later published in Campos—Fonseca’s album La Venganza del Agua [IGM, 2022].

Listen to La Creación sin Mañana

Espino Blanco

La Creación sin mañana Cover

  • Format: Single
    Release: February 07, 2025
    Catalogue: IGML-009
    GTIN/EAN/UPC: n/a
    Producer: IGM
    Commissioned by OSUCR

  • María Clara Vargas (Harpsichord)
    Sharon Villegas—Fernández (Piano)
    Alejandro Gutiérrez—Mena (Conductor)
    Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad de Costa Rica

  • Susan Campos—Fonseca

  • Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisphus (1942)

  • Campos—Fonseca — La Creación sin Mañana

    01. La Creación sin Mañana

  • Commissioned by OSUCR
    Produced by Irreverence Group Music
    Music by Susan Campos—Fonseca

    María Clara Vargas (Harpsichord)
    Sharon Villegas—Fernández (Piano)
    Alejandro Gutiérrez—Mena (Conductor)
    Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad de Costa Rica

    Recorded, mixed & mastered
    by Felipe Fernández
    at Cyancoco Studio, San José,
    Costa Rica

    Video by José María Piedra,
    Manuel Carazo & Felipe Fernández
    Edited by José María Piedra

    Album Notes by Susan Campos—Fonseca
    Artwork/Cover: IGM
    Photography by Ricardo Cambronero
    Ⓟ & © IGM 2025

Composer's NOTES

Espino Blanco (2015–2025): Holobiont Sonic Code
By Susan Campos-Fonseca

I composed Espino Blanco in 2015. The work has been brought to life sonically by New York–based Costa Rican violist Edmundo Ramírez, as well as by American violist Martha Mooke. It was first included in my album Minimal Aggression (IGM 2015) and is part of my Butō Meditations. On its tenth anniversary, I return to and revisit this particularly dear work alongside young Costa Rican violinist Manuel Loaiza. The result is this new acoustic, extended version — without the “dark ambient” electronics I designed in 2015 together with Costa Rica–based sound artist Alejandro Sánchez Núñez.

The artwork for this project is by my sister, Bárbara Campos-Fonseca, and is part of her series of embroidered photographs honoring the vitality that resists and dwells in the trees of surviving forests in Spain, England, Switzerland, and Costa Rica. In this case, the cover features a Phanocles costaricensis (also known as Juan palo), a formidable insect — a tree in itself — that lived alongside us during one of our self-managed research residencies in the jungles of Manzanillo, in Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean.

Espino Blanco [2025] is part of a project that Manuel Loaiza and I developed with the support of IGM LAB (USA–Costa Rica). We are working on other pieces that respond to this project, pursuing a relational and animist composition. We have been joined by Costa Rica–based Venezuelan pianist Virginia Villalobos, the University of Costa Rica Symphony Orchestra (OSUCR) conducted by Alejandro Gutiérrez-Mens, New York based Colombian composer, pianist, and multimedia artist Julián De La Chica, and we are honored to have the special collaboration of Ileana Obando, a Cabécar Indigenous leader from Alto Pacuare (Costa Rica), who entrusted us with the sacred healing song TERBË RA I DËKA̱.

For me, composing is a sonic investigation into what makes us the “human species,” and what we deny in the name of that “humanity.” I compose with the purpose of remembering that we are living beings: holobionts. Ten years later, Espino Blanco still holds a sonic code I trust — the score has become a manifestation of the smoking obsidian mirror (Tezcatlipoca) that guides me.

Susan Campos-Fonseca, PhD
Composer, researcher, and sonic creator
Manzanillo, Southern Caribbean of Costa Rica
August 3, 2025

Susan Campos—Fonseca
& Manuel Loaiza
Photo by Susan Campos—Fonseca

About the author

Campos—Fonseca holds a Ph.D. in music from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain. Master in Spanish and Latin American Philosophy from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), and graduated in Conducting by the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). She is a composer and musicologist whose research focuses on philosophy of culture and technology, feminism, decolonial studies, electronic art and sound studies.