Review: Merma Suelo – S/T

“We're entering the liquid era, in which land is fading away. Stability is fading away. And what will there be left? Which stories? Which bodies?”

Merma Suelo is an articulation of this liquid era, through which sounds are relieved of their edges and are yet to define themselves anew. There are actual recordings of running water, but also other artefacts rendered fluid: field recordings degraded into slush, stones and gravel dislodged into a downpour. Often the album sounds intentionally unfilled, as if engaging in the liquidity of the negative state, of everything that is not – such as on “hidroslidaridad”, during which a trickling stream and ceramic chiming sit, basin-like, beneath a brimming emptiness, quivering in aftermath, anticipating the new. The brevity of the record as a whole means that it's seemingly cradled in the silence it doesn't fill. Yet the plethora of loops and delays destabilise the linearity of time and thus any attempt to measure it; we’re here for 26 minutes, yet we’re also here for eternity. The water passes continually through our fingers.

In trying to articulate this transitory state, the record takes a multidimensional tact. A single language is perhaps inadequate in its fidelity, and thus other mediums are deployed: English/Spanish bilinguality for one, but also the distortion of cheap dictaphones, the blurred displacement of voices projected from nearby rooms, the manipulation of recordings into reverse…these techniques augment language and complicate its phonetic possibilities, as if Merma Suelo is trying to render the liminal sensations that run through the gaps between semantically-adjacent phrases. Voices skim into audibility and then pass out again, never staying long enough to elaborate upon themselves. And in this way the record articulates itself perfectly, aggregating its words and atmospheres into a sensation that floods the body with charge of the indescribable, without ever collapsing its possibilities.