Hebra is the latest in Lorenzo Gómez Oviedo’s quietly expanding catalogue. Like Cielo and others before it, Hebra takes the form of one track, reclining itself across a spacious forty-ish minutes.
Its beginnings are melodic, even ecclesiastical; what sounds like the ghost of a gospel organ, displaced in time, extends its notes to unnatural lengths. The timbre is unmistakably clerical. It’s music the church wall retains, soaked and stretched through its wood, when the congregation are tucked up at home. There’s a profound contrast between this quasi-religious mood, and the tree which decorates Hebra’s cover. Sounds rooted in the traditions of the organised church are repurposed for an almost pagan sense of immanence. The Mujica poem which accompanies Hebra speaks of naming absence—and what else, after all, is God? The wait; the silence; the space. Absence is where we locate divinity.
This all positions Hebra as ethereal, but it actually has a deeply-rooted relationship with the material world. Hebra finds its punch in concrete sounds; brushed cymbals, delicately controlled feedback, and (in the most overt intrusion of the material world) the sound of rainfall. Rainfall in ambient music is normally a signaller of the hokey side of new-age. But here, it’s ingeniously mixed so low you could mistake it for surface noise.
And Hebra is too dissonant for new-age ears, too; quietly wringing tension, exhausting the moment for everything it’s got. Chords argue over one another, sounds reach the point of feeding back before being halted in the nick of time. This dissonance is never uncomfortable, instead “seeking”, like a flâneur who pretends they’re going anywhere but the coffee shop. Hebra diverts, diverges, self-interrupts—but it knows what it’s doing, and it stays the course.
Hebra is available for purchase and streaming here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe