Una pluma en el oleaje is a spacious and organic EP from Lorenzo Gomez Oviedo. Incorporating field recordings of the creaking flora of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, this work displays a brittle nativity. It’s both as tough and as fragile as bark.
The EP opens with a percussive flutter—something like bat’s wings, or rocks skipping down a slope—which suggests descent from a great altitude. We then breach the canopy, and plunge into thick ambience. In its opening moments, Una pluma… bears comparison to new age veterans like Terry Riley—but that’s not to say it’s dinner party music for hippies. Oviedo grasps for divinity. He fully explores inner and outer worlds, and dodges the self-care soundtracking that new age can sometimes settle for.
Song titles are mysterious triptychs which glue natural and unnatural elements. As well as describing mediums used for the pieces, they provide an evocation of mood. There is a calculated mystery to Una pluma… which provokes consideration of some great unknown.
Pieces incrementally lengthen in a slowing cycle of breath. Structurally, Una pluma… is a hypnagogic lure; a well which yawns to suck the listener in. ‘Huida, temblores, silencio’, the EP’s second track, boasts a tanpura drone that batters you into a trance (used to similarly dazzling effect in Kelly Lee Owens’ ‘8’). The experience of Una pluma… is, then, a sinking sleep—a cosy darkness that stretches further ahead with your every step.
‘Plástico, niebla, hojas’ wakes things up again, and is the most melodic piece on here. It’s a joyous and revelatory closer, one which feels like an unveiling. But with its truth, revealed at the heart of the forest, comes something discordant and frightening. There's overpowering sublimity, and chords which melt into each other’s space creating atonality. A forest of sound, its many voices sing in complex harmony. With Una pluma…, Oviedo snares us from our perch on the mesa into haunted forests, shows us the leaf-littered floor, and lets us reascend afterwards.
Una pluma en el oleaje is available for streaming and free download here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe