C. Lavender — Gogoratu/To Remember (Self-released)
Gogoratu/To Remember by C. Lavender
No one who lives escapes grief, but as our increasingly de-ritualized society leaves us with fewer containers for either collective or individual grief, loss becomes harder to suss out. Lavender Suarez’s Gogoratu/To Remember was commissioned in the fall of 2021 by the Winnipeg-based new media festival Send+Receive Fest, where it was presented outdoors via quad-audio speaker arrangement. Suarez, who records as C. Lavender, improvised these four pieces over two days, while mourning the recent death of her grandmother.
As a sound healer, Suarez serves clients suffering from acute physical maladies (like chronic headaches) as well as harder-to-diagnose ailments (like artistic blockage). Like most of Suarez’s recordings, Gogoratu/To Remember is sonically minimal and repetitive; sometimes droning and dirge-like (though it is not funeral music), sometimes suggesting a field recording from outer space, sometimes bringing to mind the sun setting over glittering water. Through her intentionality and auditory dimensionality, Suarez’s work resists fading to the background. Even a distracted or resistant listener may feel themselves turning towards a deeper internal awareness.
Grief is both a physical malady and a spiritual one, it is both personal and social. Here, as Suarez explores personal loss, she offers space for a more public one: The aesthetic outlier of this recording is "II," a dynamic, shimmery, pixelated tribute to the late electronic artist Peter Rehberg, who died in July of 2021. It’s impossible to guess how Gogoratu/To Remember will land for an individual listener: Where some may feel the weight of grief imbued in these sounds, others may find something entirely different. But Suarez, healer that she is, offers the listener room to explore.
