The conundrum of water
La venganza del agua, the latest album by Costa Rican composer Susan Campos-Fonseca, is a journey between sounds that reflect a sustained struggle: a pitched battle between music and noise, between avant-garde and tradition, between calming harmonies and disturbing dissonances. Piece after piece, minute after minute, Campos-Fonseca’s music invites us to confront the irreconcilable tension between the water that emanates from the mountains and is filtered, alive, through the pores of the earth; and a civilizing project that threatens life in order to concentrate power and wealth.
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Review by Jorge David García, PhD.
Susan Campos-Fonseca
Photo by Ernesto Rodríguez Jr.
Thus, the piece entitled Quesintuu & Umantuu, in honor of the mythical sirens of Lake Titicaca, reveals a confrontation between ghostly voices, wind sounds and incisive harmonies emitted by the piano, with a force reminiscent of the lacustrine currents in which they can still hear ancient whispers. In Kä Nage, on the other hand, the pulsations of what could represent a chronometric, linear time -typical of the western conception of history- are heard, contrasting with recurrent and cyclical gestures, as well as with sounds that remain stoic as if they existed in a timeless dimension of existence.
Quesintuu & Umantuu | score by Susan Campos-Fonseca.
Art by José Pablo Ureña
Photo by IGM Lab
In Refugio, the metallic sounds of a French horn coexist, which reminds us of the porous materiality of stones, with electronic sounds that flow like currents of wind and chimerical insects, but which could also refer to capitalist anxiety for expansion, domination and economic development. Meanwhile, Esfinge offers us a glimpse into the past, represented by the harmonies and cadential turns of the harpsichord, as if this piece would like to remind us, just as the sphinxes did in ancient times, that human knowledge and history are only part of a divine riddle—I dare to say cosmological—that remains indecipherable for most mortal beings.
La creación sin mañana, a large format work for string orchestra, noise machine, percussion ensemble, horns, piano and harpsichord, is perhaps the work that best synthesizes the general message of the album: the idea that the future is only a cultural construction, intimately linked with the expansionist intention of the colonial thought, which in its overall thrust to destroy ends up, paradoxically, for denying posterity to those who seek to live in harmony with their surroundings. Based on the myth of Sisyphus, this work recalls the absurd situation of constantly pushing our huge boulder up to an unreachable hilltop, instead of conceiving ourselves as an inseparable part of it.
Video | La creación sin mañana
The last piece of the album, La venganza del agua (from which the album derives its name) for piano, harpsichord and live drawing sonification, concludes the moment when the journey to Ithaca ends up, reminding us, just as Cavafis did at the time, that destiny of navigators is simply to travel, to cross the islands of contradiction, of noise, of the ongoing struggle not to shipwreck. The thunderous climax with which this piece ends, and which also serves as the closure of the entire album, is the confirmation that water will transcend the transformations that derive from human action; the question, however, is whether the human being will be capable to go beyond its own need of destroying what it requires for his survival.
Susan Campos-Fonseca
Photo by Ernesto Rodríguez Jr.
Like the Sphinx of Apollodorus, Campos-Fonseca's album welcomes us with a conundrum: what would a human being have to listen to in order to acknowledge their own complexity? The noises, the voices, the murmurs, are the only answer we receive from the water, that great master whose vengeance is to return, in light of our questions and challenges, a distorted reflection of our own nature.
Jorge David García, PhD.
Sound Maker [Creador sonoro]