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Luciform mario diaz de leon12/16/2023 ![]() The work packs a hell of a lot into nine-and-a-half minutes-so much so that you might need a little bit of a breather. (Rubin manages this risky, awkward move with impressive grace.) Later on, the instrumentalist and the pre-engineered sounds partner up for a memorably precise and glitchy passage. The second duo piece is the album's title track, and it asks for Joshua Rubin's bass clarinet to go into reed-squawk mode. The fast switches are what keep the piece interesting. At other points, Chase's breathy sound is just a complement to the rampaging crunch of the composer's programming. Over the course of its 13-and-a-half minutes, Chase's flute sometimes often carries the melodic line, while the electronics swoop in big, sine-wave-surfing curves behind her. The opener, "Luciform", is a duo between Diaz de Leon's electronics and flutist Claire Chase (a recent MacArthur "Genius Grant" awardee). ![]() In three different pieces that collectively stretch just over 40 minutes, he gives listeners two riff-rollercoaster duos and a 20-minute, chamber-band essay of grim, beguiling beauty. The Soul Is the Arena is Diaz de Leon's latest chamber-music album since Enter Houses Of, and it's both shorter and more all-encompassing. The noise throbbed with snarling exuberance the woodwinds doled out haunting harmonies. His first solo-composer album, Enter Houses Of, was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and showed him to be adept at weaving opulently distorted electronics with virtuoso acoustic-instrumental parts, written for players drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble. Plenty of people can write a one-off "amplified" piece for chamber musicians, but few artists have built a language as stable and rewarding as Diaz de Leon's. What makes Diaz de Leon stand out from his peers, though, is his ability to distill these influences into a balanced aesthetic. It's a sound that can make sense on a Liturgy bill. (Diaz de Leon comes by the latter reference point honestly, having collaborated with group member Nate Young in a duo that goes by the name Standard Deviance One.) When he's not working in chamber-music mode, Diaz de Leon also sometimes goes by the moniker Oneirogen-a guise which finds him splitting his attention between an electric guitar and a synth setup, ultimately creating a wash of doomy chords and spacey soundscapes. I have a sister, three years younger than me, whom I look up to very much.In that respect, Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon is on-trend: the promotional material for his latest release of chamber pieces cites both Stockhausen as well the abrasion specialists in Wolf Eyes. ![]() The machines should extend us, not enslave us.ĭo you have siblings and how do they feel about your career? Technology must ultimately serve a vision, and that comes from inside. But I think that creative vision is by far the most important thing. Even my purely acoustic pieces, like the string quartets, are informed by technology. Technology is a essential to most of my work, I embrace it. How important is technology to your creative process? What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)? Who would you most like to collaborate with? If I wasn’t a musician I might be a professor of comparative religion at a university somewhere, and a teacher of Breathwork. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead? I haven’t spent much time here to be honest, but I hope that will change. But here are some important ones.Įlectronic Music. What are your 5 favorite albums of all time? I bought a Metallica tape and an issue of Metal Maniacs at the gas station near my house at age 9. I got my first guitar when I was 10 and joined my first band when I was 12. How and when did you get into making music? What is the biggest inspiration for your music? Factsġ: My last show in Berlin featured me playing guitar.Ģ: My next show in Berlin will not feature any guitar.ģ: My name is pronounced o-NI-ro-jen and essentially means “dream creator”. With its precise song structures and haunting integration of melody and texture, the album’s drum-less distortion went far beyond the categories of “drone” and “ambient”, into a style unique to the album. This was followed in 2013 with “Kiasma”, an intensification of the doom/black metal elements present on the debut. The project was initiated in 2012 with the release of “Hypnos”, which garnered widespread acclaim among fans of experimental and heavy music for its varied and cinematic style, merging ethereal synths, brutal distortion, dark ambient and noise. As ONEIROGEN (o-NI-ro-jen), Mario Diaz de Leon creates his own style of hallucinatory music.
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