Maria Chavez - Plays (Stefan Goldmann's Ghost Hemiola) (Macro, 2019)
A DJ mix album? A 60 minute-long remix? An electroacoustic creatio ex nihilio?
Turntablist and sound artist Maria Chávez turns in her first continuous full length audio work. “Plays” is a DJ mix CD that doesn't feature any tracks. It is a remix of a work whose original doesn't feature recorded sound. It is a minimalistic yet complex electroacoustic work, literally built from scratch, bootstrapping sound out of sheer silence: creatio ex nihilio.
Chávez's work with records and turntables usually features a rich layer of recorded audio which is transformed, cut up and rearranged by a wide range of fearless physical manipulations. Chávez employs digital processes extensively, zooming into minute details of sound and the artifacts of both mediums, the tangible vinyl record and disembodied digital audio. Narrowing down shards of sound to extremely short frames creates metallic timbres, reverberating quasispaces and percussive layers. Slowing down the tempo until sound halts at one sample of its digital representation brings forth emergent frequencies, which Chávez then uses to play melodies – vaguely resembling her analog technique of playing melodies by skipping a stylus back and forth across a test tone record.
