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"a scuttling micro world of submerged beasties" -THE WIRE
Featured: Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp (August).
"...La Cantera Oriente is an inadvertent testament to the city's lacustrine history. Its line of Ahuehuete trees, rooted along the water's edge, evokes memories of a time when water dominated. Springs continually flow, reclaiming a site once exploited for basalt extraction used in paving the city's streets. The voracious excavation inadvertently unleashed this gushing presence, a reminder of the water that demands acknowledgment." -- María Antonia González Valerio, curator, “Spaces of Resistance: An Incomplete Catalogue of Nature on the Urban Fringes,” .
Cantera Oriente swims in ambiguities and hybridities. The album is composed from field recordings taken over 18 months of field work in an ecological reserve in the southern part of Mexico City, with its 21 million inhabitants. Like the megapolis of Mexico City itself, Cantera Oriente is a site of contradictions, ad hoc amalgams and unlikely syntheses. It was once a quarry, then a series of water filled lagoons, and now, after soil was brought in to fill some of these waterways, it exists as a reserve, an open lab for the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a series of football training fields.
In this work nature and culture blur, as Leena Lee and Guillermo Guevara make audible the intricate interactions between asphalt, basaltic rocks, piped water, housing, earthquakes which are entangled with Mexico City's particular histories and contemporary realities.
If space is, as the geographer Doreen Massey suggests, a "simultaneity of stories so far", then Cantera Oriente has a plethora of tales to recount. Over the five pieces which comprise this album, Bosque Vacío (Lee and Guevara) encourage us to consider just some of these in compositions which create room for the complexities of place to unfold, and the reverberative legacies of mining and extraction to be heard.
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Cantera Oriente was developed as a live act for the exhibition “Spaces of Resistance: An Incomplete Catalogue of Nature on the Urban Fringes. Produced by Arte+Ciencia and Bios ex Machina and exhibited in 2023 at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico. This exhibition focused on manifestations of nature in urban enclaves, and attempted a critical examination histories of urbanisation in Mexico City.
credits
released August 9, 2024
All tracks by Leena Lee and Guillermo Guevara
Mixing and mastering: Guillermo Guevara
Field recording of “Subacuática” courtesy of Robertina Šebjanič
Drone image courtesy of María Antonia González Valerio
Special thanks to Arte + Ciencia research group of the National Autonomous University of México, María Antonia González Valerio, and Robertina Šebjanič.
Design: Leena Lee and Kate Carr
supported by 19 fans who also own “Cantera Oriente”
A connected suite of miniatures, a densely layered city walkabout, with subtle extensions of metal touches into drones and rising/falling tones, birds sing along with suspense elements, a keenly observed, masterfully assembled set. mikehoolboom
supported by 14 fans who also own “Cantera Oriente”
as an expression of the poetics of this moment, the unease in this work is comfortable and welcoming to me. it gives breathing room.
I'd love to read the limpet in any form it comes forward.
grateful 🙏 alexzito
supported by 14 fans who also own “Cantera Oriente”
The best thing about this album is how it allows you to wonder what is real and what is not – are the birds alive, are they imaginary? They are concealed and yet heard. Dream-like doesn't cut it. Luca
This gentle experimental album from Fantasma do Cerrado captures the hidden worlds of the villages of the São Paulo State inlands. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 12, 2022
Lebanese multi-instrumentalist deconstructs classical tropes through an eccentric array of instruments, including disassembled toy pianos. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 22, 2022
A stellar compilation featuring shoegaze and indie favorites like Drowse, Midwife, and Mount Eerie benefitting Project Onward in Chicago. Bandcamp New & Notable May 11, 2023
supported by 14 fans who also own “Cantera Oriente”
A suite of ambient miniatures, each opens with a stereo panned glitch that loops before giving way to moody tones and fizzy circuits. Quiet, thoughtful and lovely. mikehoolboom