*2024 stock* Spanning the a-side, Blasco’s “Travesía” sounds the troubled resonance and emotional history of a series of defensive bunkers she encountered on a trip to the Spanish Pyrenees. Ordered by the dictator Franco and built by prisoners of war between 1944-48, this was one of Europe’s most ambitious defensive plans at the time, though the bunkers were never fully completed or used as intended. The site was buried and forgotten following Franco’s fall, until recent efforts by organizations committed to confronting the darker corners of Spanish history brought them back into the light. “The massive network of the dictatorship´s buried and forgotten fortifications embodied [to me] the tendency in Spanish society to bury our dark histories in the interest of collectively moving forward,” explains Blasco, “despite how denial of the past has continued to prevent our collective healing.”

On the flip, we find Baron’s expansive “The Matrix.” Developed through a process that they have privately taken to calling “YouTube Kabbalah,” this piece pulls from a wide variety of source material, including video tutorials, spiritual self-help tapes, open access resources for music educators, and their own personal field recording archive. The result is a rich melangé of sound that attempts to harmonize itself with the found world as it coalesces around a semi-aleatoric audio-documentary stitched together from the artist’s life and the internet. A spiritual successor to their 2020 piece “To the Planetarium,” this piece attempts to approach the ongoingness of radio, but without a particular thematic intention or curatorial aim, spooling off into the ether like some sort of transhistorical shuffle.

 

While these pieces were developed independently of one another, they reinforce and deepen one another: two sonic cartographers charting the opaque contours of their discrete cultural identities and slowly approaching a shared horizon.