Julia Jung Un Suh - James Díaz: [speaking in a foreign language] (2024)

From the scintillating, prismatic opening pitches of James Díaz’ [speaking in a foreign language], it excavates new sonic territory for an electroacoustic work. The piece vacillates between immersive textures and dialogic ones in which the violin and electronics comment, spar, and interact with each other; in Díaz’s words, the concept is “violin as electronics.” His frequent use of pitch shifting alters the listener’s sense of sonic reality, putting us in a hall of mirrors, or perhaps analogously through the looking glass of layered linguistic reinterpretations. His vocabulary of delays, FM synthesis, and reverb settings (all generated from Julia Jung Un Suh’s violin) are all put at the service of a quasi-ritualistic thread that runs through the album. Díaz also takes a compositional approach to the recording process itself, using immersive close-micing and expansive digital processing to stretch the expressive range of the violin. Throughout, the music retains a soulful core, with a clear expressive voice emerging from Suh’s poignant violin regardless of context.

In “atardecer in en 8-bits,” Suh’s violin tones undulate and gently collide with each other, as Díaz marshals the resources of his electronics palette to create a sinewy, synthetic chorale. At times, Suh’s violin sounds like a pipe organ, only to have its towering tones disrupted by glitchy hiccups. “they became his angels” opens with discrete acoustic violin material. Fragments of melodic and gestural ideas sigh and circle around central pitches. The electronics are heard flitting around the perimeter, high pitched ricochets pinging off the walls of an imaginary cavern. As the track evolves, the duration of the responsive sounds in the electronics increases, with searing long tones filtered through FM synthesis heard in the “distance.” “they became his angels” ends with Suh playing pointed pizzicato chords that are gradually detuned.