PHACE / ensemble recherche ARTURO FUENTES Space Factory

The Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes (born in 1975) arrived in Europe in 1997; his musical path led him from Milan, Paris and Vienna to his current home in Innsbruck. He has studied with Franco Donatoni in Milan and Horacio Vaggione in Paris. Arturo Fuentes composes instrumental music, electronic music and conceives new musical theater projects that combine dance, video and electronics. His music is characterized as a meticulously organized kaleidoscopic chaos that explores the frontiers of dynamics, color, texture and virtuosity. This music unveils a constantly evolving sculptural design; you perceive a sonic space occupied by constant agitation – it’s research into an aerial tonality.

Regardless of the form, the creative process for the piece is always “ongoing”. Arturo Fuentes likes to define his work as an “emerging form”. In a paraphrase of the painter Paul Klee who claimed to “take a walk with a line”, Fuentes writes: “I select a sonorous line and walk with it. The breaks in the line, changes in speed, suspended moments, etc. – all of these things lead to the emergence of a sonorous form and musical context.”

His reference to painting is no coincidence. Arturo Fuentes proposes that you listen to his music like a “fusion of colors within a dome full of grain”. The sonorous texture and the instrumental synthesis are the elements that correspond to this idea of color in his music. For him, you rediscover another form of emergence in his work; as in a tableau, the forms emerge from the mix of colors.

However, even if Arturo Fuentes sees the form of his works like a labyrinthine path in which he loses the discursive musical line in order to regain it after several detours, it seems very important to him that a logical dramaturgy appears in the work – a veritable guideline that steers the listener to a discovery of a sonorous world. Textures, colors and labyrinths are all abstract ideas that enable you to grasp his music.

Neos presents a collection of music from Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes, performed by the PHACE Ensemble and Ensemble Recherche. "I ran into Arturo Fuentes for the first time at IRCAM, in the late '90s. He talked to me for a long time about his passion for logic and analytic philosophy, quoting Quine and Wittgenstein. His music, which I discovered later on, did surprisingly contradict the expectations that were arisen from those discussions. Instead of the crystal-clear development and the rational see-throughness I was waiting for, I got lost in a charmingly chaotic and obsessive sound world, whose rich, frenetic textures seemed to dwell in the shadow cast by language, in the 'ineffable' evoked by Wittgenstein, that region, quoting Giorgio Agamben, where 'the language stops and the matter of words begins.'" (Mauro Lanza)