Susan Campos Fonseca & Julian De La Chica: Minimal Aggression
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 reflection on Minimalism, it’s possibilities and trajectories in the XXI 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).
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 Sanchez Nunez, and the poems of Elise Plain, Juan Andrés García Román, Marco Aguilar Sanabria and Susan Campos-Fonseca.
Susan Campos - Fonseca
Photo by Hassan Malik
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.
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.