Victor Mazón and Martin Howse

You just ripped it up, my friends, in Espacio X in back of the Cathedral here in Mexico City. Both in different ways were exercises in tuning electromagnetic waves, louder, louder, and louder, sounding out the objects in the room, and the room--one of those objects being us, the listeners, as the sound became more and more physical, giving up its pressure wave status onto the surfaces, and indeed beneath the surfaces, of one's body.

I have never seen a laser fired at a pile of dirt on a custom made tone generator before. I have never seen water poured on a laser fired at a pile of dirt on a custom made tone generator before. I have never seen a sparkler lit underneath a laser etc etc. Martin...

And Victor, the frog in the slowly boiling water. If I had detected that level of infrasound at that volume spontaneously, round a corner, I would not have gone around that corner. But somehow you kept me in the room as the volume went up and up.

Mind you--I'm quite well trained. I reckon we were up at about 110 decibels. My Bloody Valentine goes over 120 on a regular basis, and I'm pretty sure that midsection of “You Made Me Realise” hits about 130. People were throwing up, running out of the room, clutching their ears--and they were already wearing earplugs. The decibel scale is logarithmic, so 130 is way way more than 120. It's why I wrote this essay called “Beauty Is Death.”

Somehow I got that same feeling from Mazón's Subcutáneo. Death around the corner, quietly throbbing: physical disintegration not imminent but about to be looming, like realizing you are possibly falling towards a black hole that is still quite far off.

Howse's Substrate was an alchemical translation-interpretation of objects by objects by objects...a nonstop pile of resonating physicality. Wow.