DOCUMENTO_UNO by HUGO ESQUINCA

Hugo Esquinca offers his debut album format release, DOCUMENTO_UNO, for Psychic Liberation stating:

“DOCUMENTO_UNO [2014-2024] is a -mis-selection of bastardized personal archival material containing actions, installations, induced DSP corruption, after-hours field recordings and direct documentation of audio equipment degradation. With the intention to dispose rather than preserve, all files utilized for the production of this CD have been permanently deleted after usage.”

Copious libations and long, long walks around metropolitan sprawl are part of the process material that cultivate the contained audio within DOCUMENTO_UNO. Esquinca posits a formal conundrum, skewing the perceptual intake of the organic and inorganic aurality in a collaged twenty-nine minutes and thirty-nine seconds of Esquinca’s auto-documentarian efforts. Something about weighted city environments, places like Mexico City or Berlin or Glasgow, and how they interrelate with weather extremities, finances, alcohol, and one's personhood are embedded in DOCUMENTO_UNO. At the end of the day, you are not at home.

Esquinca is known for large scale audio works that take on the extremity of amplification to incite situations and circumstances that become ruminations on what is impenetrable or absent* yet consequently disruptive**. For DOCUMENTO_UNO a similar through line to materiality and ephemeral outcome is observed. The pushing of a recording device to its furthest capabilities and the harmonic damages that follow through as a result. The unwavering compositional directive to keep finding the threshold of the audio space, first in capturing from life and then later from processing and arranging. This is Esquincas first album effort.

The truth is that Esquinca is exhausted by Sound and its orbiting cultural sphere. His multifaceted work as an artist, researcher, and writer continually exhibits a perspective in extremity that manifests a perspective a politer audience recoils in facing. Esquinca though is no brute, nor looking for cheap tactics to elicit canonized pearl-clutching responses to the vulgarity of our times. DOCUMENTO_UNO complexly collages confrontation in formal, mechanistic, or actionable methods to unsettle your stereo and effectively not save your world.

In many ways, this release is a family affair for Esquinca. DOCUMENTO_UNO is the result of many nights of long talks and beverage consumption with friend and collaborator Nick Klein. Additionally, a selection of the original source material has been remixed by Russell Haswell, a longtime collaborator and friend of Esquinca.


* See works done at EMPAC in Troy, New York, where an entire auditorium's multi-channel sound system was played at maximum volume after hours with no one allowed in the building, leaving only the vibratory sensation of the architecture to speak to the idea of absence for the viewer.
** See Esquincas latest work, as part of a festival dedicated to Alvin Lucier, where the artist reinterprets Luciers “Sound On Paper”. Here Esquinca trades paper for architectural glass, focusing thousands of watts of amplification onto the glass to more caustically illustrate Luciers paper observations.

Label founded in 2013, originally ran with Miguel Alvariño titled Primitive Languages as a cassette and record store project in New York City. Operated solo by Nick Klein since 2019 under the working title Psychic Liberation out of the EU. PL is made possible with the distribution assistance of Fantastique INC USA, Industrial Coast UK, Tobira Records JP, Rope Editions SK, and Stellage Store RU.

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