Bryan Senti - Manu (2022) Hi-Res

“Manu” dances at the edge of sense. It freezes time, snapshots through a clerestory window. Fragmented melodies will themselves into creation. Then, silence. Is it the end? No, a moment of reflection. A breath. Then the fragments return. Sounds swirl and coalesce—a plucked violin, a piercing harmonic—then back into ether. Frozen time thaws, drips, then resolidifies. A familiar chord progression appears, beating footprints of a danzón half-forgotten—a memory of a memory.

Manu, for me, is a deeply personal record that threads the needle between the western classical music that I was schooled in and the music of my parent’s homelands, Colombia and Cuba, as well as greater Latin America. At the outset of my journey to connect these two worlds was a re-examining of performance practice on my primary instrument, the violin. So much of what is saliently characteristic of folk music is encapsulated in the way it’s played. The translucent-ness of the sound is something that lies in stark opposition to the full-bodied

technique requisite of romantic violin playing. But after expanding my approach to the instrument, and all the extended techniques afforded to it, new color palettes emerged. When paired with neo classical gestures, the ephemeral quality of the playing and inherent minimalism of folk and indigenous musical idiom eventually opened the door to a kind of dream-like, modern impressionism that was finally sui generis. The music that followed is both naturalistic and yet transcendental, and for me traces a musical corridor from my world to that of my parents and ancestors.