Haarvöl - Seeking the intimacy of silence (2023)

One of the things the pandemic brought us was an eerie silence: imposed, artificial.
Together with the silence, it brought a concomitant isolation. It left its mark on all of us, in different ways, but a distinct mark which still remains today.

This new release which we bring you now, holds, at its core, this recent experience.
That is why we wanted to address what we decided to call a kind of intimacy with silence. Above all, it is a question of highlighting the difference between the previous artificiality and imposition by another relationship: now free, now real. To be intimate with silence is to recognise its existence and importance (as Cage taught us many decades ago) and thus to attempt an approximation to try to bring reality into the sounds we have built. A part of that reality, at least, the one that is detached from anaesthesia; the one whose silence is active.

The pandemic and the forced isolation brought us another need: to be with others again, to share life and reality (without screens or other devices to disguise the distance).
That's also why this record was built in a different logic from all our previous ones: in face-to-face sessions, in which the tracks were being built in a live environment that we had never tried before. What is heard has been played and experienced in a continuous sound dialogue, and yet without a safety net. Perhaps the pandemic has brought us closer together and more eager to enjoy the present.
It was, therefore, the sounds that approached and brought us closer to this longed-for conviviality with the idea of silence.

Togetherness extended to the collaborations we love so much. To collaborate is to enhance sharing. On this record, we can hear Martijn Comes's guitar or Xoán-Xil López's cello in a crossing of intentionalities and sounds that feed our desired approach.
A few words, too, for the importance of words.

On this album, we built the track titles as if they were a poem. It was a deliberate choice to preserve its unity, its whole. This is an album that refuses the fragmentary, but rather is made of fragments. Fragments of a whole. And that whole is the result of this kind of poetic metaphor that is embodied in its title.
May the approach to silence thus be an allegory of a time and reality that are ours and with which we want to interact intensely, even if we interfere in its most intimate moments, or in other words, its silences...
Indeed, Cage again, or memory as a device to nullify distance.