Ale Hop - The Life of Insects (2020)

Ale Hop is an artist, researcher, and experimental instrumentalist. She composes electronic and electroacoustic music, by blending strains of noise, pop, avant-garde, ambient and a complex repertoire of extended techniques for electric guitar and real-time sampling devices which she uses as her sound vocabulary to craft a performance of astonishing physical intensity, saturated of layers of distortion and stunning atmospheres.

Her body of work includes immersive multichannel installations, live performances, sound sculptures, video, 3D, composition and sound design for theater, dance and film, releases, academic publications, and workshops. The Life of Insects is her fourth studio album.

The composer began to craft the album The Life of Insects after spending one month living with different types of insects in her home studio, which she bought from a local insect dealer in Berlin and built little terrariums to record them for the sound design of a film she was working on.

Nonetheless, the album is not comprised of compositions based specifically on sound recordings of the insects, but it unfolds as an imagined world recomposed through speculated narrative and abstract elements that seek to portray their lives, assembling sounding stories that could be re-constructed in the mind of the active listener.

For this purpose, the artist came up with a musical language that could hold this fictional universe, comprised principally of several layers and textures of guitars that mimic environmental and atmospheric sounds.