As magma creeps through the planet’s crust, it creates a resonance. The viscous molten rock rises and falls thanks to convection, moving tectonic plates to its wanton desires. It’s near impossible for the human mind to comprehend this spectacle but it’s real, and it’s part of our ecosystem.

Let’s say for a moment that this resonance goes into a frequency that approaches the essence of music. It studies the variety of waveforms, harmonics, nodes, and antinodes, learning enough to mimic it. Could this roaring of earth’s insides create music?

El Sol de los Muertos, the newest album by Concepción Huerta, imagines a symphony that will turn into basalt after exposure to the atmosphere. Reverberated found sounds, an essential tool of musique concrète, interjects swelling mesmerising drones. Magma cools down, falls, warms up, and rises again, swirling forever in the asthenosphere.

Dirge like laments resonate through empty karst structures (‘el interior de la tierra arde como el sol’). Ancient weathered strip mines full of feldspar and galena are splattered by the blood of thousands of locals who fell under the blade of Conquistadors and buccaneers (‘el sol de los muertos’). Rising magma superheats water and on its trip, travels with copious amounts of dissolved iron and magnesium oxides, feeding a local water sanctuary that will become an amusement park on a distant future, when there’s no one to stand up for the place (‘La tierra y sus poderes subterráneos’).

I’m a sucker for an album like this. Impossible to describe in simpler words without going into tangents. An album not for speakers, but for the intimacy of a good pair of wired earphones. El Sol de los muertos must be consumed in mass quantities near midnight, where it makes so much sense as an experience.

El Sol de Los Muertos is an album that would pair perfectly with Belong‘s October Language, any of the BBC Radiophonic musique concrète albums, and even White Noise‘s genre-defining An Electric Storm. But don’t be fooled by these comparisons, whittled down from a day’s worth of annotations, Concepción Huerta deftly smoulders her own path. My comparisons are for reference only, not to pigeonhole Concepción Huerta‘s creativity in boxes that might resemble her art, but they certainly won’t define it.

Let this album rip through your ears, like a wild faulty ebow scratching your guitar strings, unheard once everything snaps into a beautiful disaster.

—Sam J. Valdés López

ASIDE: ‘El sol de los muertos’ got me into writing horror again.