Ernesto Diaz-Infante has once again surprised me. This is a solo album, but much different from, let’s say, his piano solo albums from before. There is a division in Diaz-Infante’s output, between his ensemble CDs, where he collaborates intensely with fellow musicians (albeit at times by exchanging sound files over the web etcetera), and his solo productions, where he usually bores deep into the content of expression, bringing back a luminous transparency of urgencies from within.
Here he plays a number of instruments and sound sources, and I just wonder how it feels to have all these means of expression! I’m a bit envious, because I can only scream and bike and write…

The look of the CD – which, I admit, I have altered some (top of the page), superimposing two pages from the booklet – is quite minimal, sober, withheld.

You never know what to expect from Diaz-Infante, who seems to have a bottomless pit of ideas and creative whims at his immediate disposal. This CD has 30 tracks, of which 8 have titles:

It could also be that the spirit of the titles carries over into the following tracks, coloring them with whatever content the titles may suggest… and I realize also that these named tracks are the ones with a line of text, vocals.

The beginning is permeated with gasoline fumes and the roadside tool shed smell of grease. I’ve been hitchhiking up and down that California cost line, and lived in Texas, so I know what I mean… I used to get up so early in the morning to bike to work at the Texas Highway Department outpost in Irving, or was it Grand Prairie… that they called me the Texas Dew Boy…
It’s a street scene, noises of engines, maybe some bird chirps blanked out by the noise… and it’s probably hot… as the Greyhound pulls out for Phoenix or El Paso…
The crossover into a manipulated sound environment is brisk, though, as closely miked micro events soar like grains of sand down a tilting sheet of corrugated iron in someone’s backyard, while Ernesto Diaz-Infante comes at you in a John Cage voice, trembling right up your face, almost too close for comfort, but this vocal meditation à la Empty Words, albeit with real words, has a curious sonic effect, stumbling along on the soaring backdrop, some piano strings being pulled in the process… an old boy of the farm grasping at some reality…

A grainy sheet is pulled over the terrain, cooking, boiling fiercely, soon to be relieved by a crisp piano preparedness from right out of the body of the instruments; some twanging, pulling exercises in good faith…

Softer strummings caressed by that close voice, riding the strings like a kid a rail, filter out any evil forces, purifying the content of mind, an armchair sit-down in a comfortable room of the 21st century, checking the horizon for candy and death… and it rolls smoothly along, in wordings perhaps decipherable, as buildings fall and suns rise…

There is no hurry, no haste in these guitar acoustics, which seem so natural as to be self-evident in the light of day, a talk to oneself in a free moment…, a pause in the gathering of provisions…

Contact-miked static of amplification equipment or hands-on phonographic cartridges again pay homage to the Cage man of utter freedom over there in his late days among the flowerpots of his Manhattan loft. Yes! I love and cherish this pre-occupied, absentminded fumbling with electric chords, like seeing someone in deep thoughts playing with a pen or picking his nose… as the planet revolves slowly around its axis and people maintain their right to suppress one another… and seen from afar, out in the solar system, Voyager turning its eyes back past Saturn towards that tiny sphere of ours, it’s clear that it’s not a case of goodness versus evil, but simply evil versus evil…

The mix of this CD is startling, but there are points of return, i.e. the few tracks – the ones with titles – that also carry the vocals of Diaz-Infante. These tracks, though miked so closely that the words feel like they’re emerging from inside your own mind, provide a sense of succession and a feeling of motion, linear motion, direction, through these bewildering circumstances; a strange reinforcement of an artistic idea, a philosophical statement, an intuitive formation of linguistics, of morphemes, sailing through the context like cabbalistic missiles, surrounded by the silence of tongues, the roar of ears… the crisscross of telegraph wires down in the planetary surface… circuits of an alien civilization that is ours…

Jingling hinges jive away, as the soaring feeling of atmospheres build a canopy of contemporary skies for us to be spaced-out in… and it’s like the Louvre, the intense feeling of a soaring space, a soap bubble of concrete and mosaics and layers of time, a suspension of unfathomable weights, architecture of the moment blasting at eternity with the silent wheezing of atomic jitter…

Droplets seem to fall through the breath of someone close, onto a tin surface, microscopically recorded to enhance the usually overlooked aspects of the audio of sounding objects, reminding me some of Sune Karlsson’s recordings of his own nostrils in the piece Respiroia on the CD Phonia Domestica; Investigations.

I might add the observation that Diaz-Infante has chosen not to let all these tracks inch over into one another seamlessly, which might have been expected. Instead he presents the sections completely individually, with a silent stretch in between.

Often in these tracks there is a soaring atmosphere, which is very important to the feeling of surface and of movement, and of a certain tangibility, like were you moving weightlessly in the air along a tin foil surface of an already digested bar of chocolate on a kitchen table (you’re a fly: musca domestica), with your sucking device, the proboscis, scanning the shiny irregularities below for sustenance… and the music on this CD is much of the time taken onto this somewhat unfamiliar layer of existence: a nano world at the brink of visibility, just where microscopes and magnifying glasses take over, in a vicinity where tea spoons and coffee cups cast giant shadows across our field of vision, and even a lump of sugar is a mighty Kaba… and at times you feel you’re actually riding the fingertip of someone who is touching the rim of a wine glass in a circular movement to make the glass sing, like Meredith Monk on the CD Lady of Late… and you look into the depths of the glass; a deep, transparent silo, when the glass starts to moan…

Sometimes Diaz-Infante just opens up an ambience to the listener; an opportunity to hear things, much like John Cage in his silent pieces, making the unsound sound, the worthless full of value, the residue climbing unto the throne, a beggars’ banquet of rejected or simply overlooked audio… like Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio studying the little scraps of paper and lost pieces of garbage paraphernalia in the gutter of a short stretch of a street in the south of France, writing a novel from the finds! Ah, I recall those hot summer days on the porch overlooking the back yard in middle Sweden in medio of the 1970s, listening to Om Kalsoum blasting Amal Hayati over the loudspeakers as I read that Le Clézio book! The feeling is here in Diaz-Infante’s sonic finds! He’s a dream collector; a gatherer of inconspicuous finds, an interpreter of gray matter, a hunter for the next Dalai Lama…