Wilfrido Terrazas - My Shadow Leads The Way (2022)

Wilfrido Terrazas — My Shadow Leads the Way

A flutist’s shadow come alive, a bell-driven invention, a rebellion of the spoken word aspiring to be music, this collection of pieces stems from --and wraps around-- the naked eloquence of Ricardo Cázares’ poems, transforming them into a musical glossary of the instability of meaning, memory, and thought. Words here are raw musical materials, wrestling amongst themselves, unaware, as both the English and Spanish texts whirl around each other --not quite together, but also not quite apart-- and are intermittently drowned under waves of sinuous flute melodies and clouds of percussive attacks and resonances. Over them, the shadow looms large. The instrumental tracks continue to weave memories of the sounds once heard as words: sometimes into ruminating, abstract melodies; sometimes into thick, slow-morphing heterophonies hopelessly lost in themselves.

And yet, meaning is there somewhere, veiled, latent, waiting to be fully grasped, or, rather, invented. “Sound is one”, wrote the legendary Tom Corona. Perhaps it is through our own shadows that we must walk to find it. Even if it’s seemingly too late. Even if defeat has caught up with us. “Even if there is no place/that’s yours on the map”, writes Cázares, “you will have to hurry/and stake your claim/however you can/before the world and music/fall flat”. We can definitely try. But perhaps it is too late because music has already staked her claim. Claiming sound for herself, and word as sound, and, therefore, meaning as volatile and ever-changing, it subverts the specificity of the moment-poem and boosts its scope to unfathomable reaches. Still, if all fails, at the very least, we will always have the shadow.

—Wilfrido Terrazas