Huixtralizer
The Morning Resonant

2014

 

 

 

 

The Morning Resonant is a cavernous triptych by Hidalgo, Mexico-based composer Huixtralizer aka José Soberanes. Released in August 2014 on Gavin Catling’s Twice Removed Records from Perth, Australia in a limited edition of hand-stamped 3" card sleeve issues, the release can be fully streamed and purchased at Bandcamp. Soberanes uses the moniker Huixtralizer in order to articulate – and more often than not unravel – the setup of existentialism that resembles a passage rather than a recurrent set of peripheries and incidents. His music is therefore not based on loops, but feels more like a mighty cascade of recurrent pointillism with segues and placentas that are built and wired anew. Strangely enough, The Morning Resonant seems too de trop a title to address the concept of everchanging fluxion, for as the reader is painfully aware of, mornings seem awfully resemblant to each other when one rushes to work. Even the supposed freedom in terms of working as a freelancer has its traps and repetitions. So how can the beautiful coruscation of a morning fare with Huixtralizer’s prolonged Glitch-accentuated Drone washes, its various field recordings, blowing storms and synthetic sparks? I am going to tell you below.

 

The opener Maria is the prime example of Huixtralizer’s heterodyned superimposition of textural heaviness and pristine countermovements, resulting in a metallic-benthic dichotomy whose amalgamation is nonetheless freed from any bewildering convolution. I have to admit that the former sentence seems overly faux-academic, so a different wording might shed more light into the fibrillar coves: Maria is a recondite affair with increasingly argentine ship’s bells made of prolonged dark matter. Juxtaposed to the murky photometry is a wealth of glacial Glitch globs, be it the prongs of doubloons, exhaling snare blebs or ligneous asbestus pericarps. This conglomerate never feels internecine, it does not ostracize the listening subject rather than inviting it right into the epicenter. The large array of stereo-panned turmoil is probably a tad too feisty and seems to sidetrack the individual in order to guard the elysian nucleus – aka the truth – but even the twisted vortices do not harm the gustatory aura, letting Maria remain a curiously accessible Ambient coquette despite the sustained state of profusion.

 

Deeper is next and relies on the same dualistic notions and motions, taking the listener into an arcane antrum of fluorescent wind gusts and reverberated field recordings of rain drops, preparing the initial whitewashed state of a jinxed locale full-force. The droning steamer granuloma is yet again injected into the portentously cavernous depth. Despite the appalling oomph of the staggering sinews, the vestiges of nature are the earthbound rhizome to hold onto. The sheer wideness of the cavities meanwhile allows the adventurer to breathe without the fear of being asphyxiated. A Drone track by nature, Deeper is keen on prolonged tone sequences whose industrial-longitudinal blow oscillates between comforting overtones and Tartarean rotations akin to a Lovecraftian place. Although the genre term Hauntology cannot be applied all too firmly on the artist's stormy layering technique, Deeper shares more than a picayune sentiment with one of the darkest of all Dark Ambient undertones.

 

Fracturas rounds off the triptych of dense arcana, and it is here where a surprising twist takes place, if only cautiously so. Somehow, and right from the get-go of all things, Huixtralizer decides to pour an infinitesimal but ever-growing amount of glowing Psychedelica into the cesspool lacunae whose accruing billows do indeed resemble the physiognomy of said fracture. The prelude to this track of over eight minutes is hence hued in warmth, in camouflaged guitar licks and sanguine desert sands. What a great and solacing finale this would be! However, Fracturas moves on and turns out to be the most cinematic and – to drop an already overused word – progressive track of the EP or little album. Silvery illuminants and buckets of saltatory caustic solutions gurgling amid the circumambience of a blowing storm bring the contrastive titration back into place before an ethereal aureole is allowed to break through the cracks (!) of Fracturas: synth-infused syringa fibers turn out to be the gorgeously benign lavabo, the vivacious force that towers above the opaque cannelure of the otherwise gray multiplex. If this final piece causes tachycardia, it is not due to the cauterized vestibule to dark dimensions that graces its apex, but because of the first and last addendum which both encapsulate this rumbling power. The orange colors of the first two minutes of Fracturas suddenly scintillate in the finale, purple interstices spawn beguiling languor, the much needed sylvan default is reached, and within the boundaries of The Morning Resonant, it is fortunately no interim state either.

 

The Morning Resonant reveals two converse triggers that do not go well together once the attached soundscapes are interpreted, but this is all part of the aesthetic viewpoint, if not the artist’s, then all the more so this reviewer’s. The term Morning refers to the melancholia of waking up and doing one’s duty sooner rather than later, and it is in our time and age with its comparative freedom of expression that the possibility of literally not going anywhere is increasingly possible… and popular. A morning’s mellow twilight is still the ideal of a country’s workforce, of the artistic individual. Funny that the grace of this window of opportunity is not reflected in Huixtralizer’s EP! To make matters worse, in a wonderful way, mind you: the term Resonant is indeed all over the presented material, be it the shadowy eclipses of rainfall, the vibrations of wooden treasure chests or the glitchy icicles in tandem with static noise protuberances that scythe and plink through the aural ether. The raindrops may indeed be the only matutinal resonant living up to the poetic title. Everything else is a no man’s land aglow with aggrandized frequency cocktails, seething cauldrons of noise peripeteia and a tohubohu that turns into a catharthic epiphany at the end of the EP. Huixtralizer fathoms the clefts and shadows in-between the textural surfaces by annihilating the patterns in favor of freely flowing cataracts… or was that cataclysms?

 

Further listening and reading: 

 

Ambient Review 363: Huixtralizer – The Morning Resonant (2014). Originally published on Jul. 30, 2014 at AmbientExotica.com.