LAURA LUNA – ISOLARIOS
out: 18/08/2014 @ Baba Vanga
limited edition cassette and digital
Laura Luna de Castillo is a Mexican multimedia artist living in Prague. Composing tracks and working with sound are her means of bringing forth imaginary atmospheres.
“I started experimenting with making sound and music about a year ago, after an experience that made me aware of sound as a powerful enhancement to memories and narratives,” she says. “First I started to pay attention around me and to record with whatever I had available those sounds that where triggering emotions or fragments of memories. Later on when I became more sensitive to the acoustic richness, tones and changes I began to construct my own sounds to describe what I had in my imagination of certain mental scenes and stories.”
Isolarios is an immersive experience, utilising sound as an emotion activator, inviting the listener into a self-contained world where repressed or half-forgotten memories resurface blurring the border between half-conscious and dream states, a sort of somnambulist soundtrack. “The way I started making each track was always inspired by an imaginary atmosphere, after reading and seeing many kinds of media that triggered certain feelings like longing, memory, melancholy and solitude but always immersed in a foggy fantasy and mellow drowsiness,” she says. Feedback, error and accidental programming come to the forefront here, layers of swirling melodies are scattered with field recordings and voices.
Inspired by science fiction stories about lost cosmonauts and expeditions without return, magic realism and the works of Italo Calvino, Laura’s output is drenched in romanticism, but of a – sublimely – tragic kind.
