Miguel Isaza - Macondo (2017)

In ‘100 Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Marquez, there is Macondo: a town hard to declare as fully real or fictional; an archetype of the magical-real; an interstitial town, where things are, but are not. Object-oriented philosophy proposes a not so distant idea: a flat consideration of objects, an ethereal alchemy in which everything, no matter if physical or imaginary, coexists although remaining autonomous.

Such ideas can be related to listening and composition in order to reflect the state of things after the anthropocene and also to consider sound as a way to explore objects and their dramas. If we consider things equally, no matter how real they are, then we can approach all objects as ‘sonic’, to value objects as resonances, being there but not. Sound in an ontological interstice for which causality is not conceived as fixed to a particular mechanistic perspective but rather a sonic scaffolding: a mutant, mysterious, paradoxical set of objects.

When it comes to listening, both materiality and intangibility interact, so here composition appears as a way of weaving such interstitial objects, made of echoes of field recordings, found objects, aural situations, sonic memories, digital dots, analog synths, electromagnetic fields, musical instruments, among others. Everything with everything, not caring about sounds, but objects as such.

Macondo was composed in Medellín, Colombia during 2017, based on an exploration of materials gathered since 2012 and used in a research project called Aleph, started in 2016 with video artist Rossana Uribe and philosopher Camilo Tamayo and dedicated to research into magical realism. It has presented both in av installations and performance, the first sonic-only result of the process, presented initially in an acousmatic installation at FLORA ars+natura gallery in Bogotá, Colombia.

Track names 1 to 3 have been taken literally from a phrase present in the first page of 100 years of solitude: “(1) The world was so recent (2) that many things lacked names, (3) and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point…”. Track 4 is a quote by Timothy Morton from his book ‘Realist Magic’.