Mexican-born Laura Luna Castillo, a multimedia artist who had produced
virtual reality projects, audiovisual installations and sculptures,
studied in Prague between 2014 and 2018 and released there her first
official album, Isolarios (Baba Vanga, 2014), an electronic symphony
for vintage synths, loops, drones and field recordings.
The mysterious ambient/cosmic music of Auroras (9:05) evolves into bouncing synth tones.
The industrial ambience of dirty glitchy drones in Ennui Hours (8:32)
and the hissing wind that morphs into muffled ghostly sounds over tumbling organ chords in Oxytocin (10:41) create gothic trance.
The mesmeric disappearance of sounds of nature in Hobyahs (6:46) and
the way
found sounds are refined and mixed with a gentle flow of electronic melody in Wasteland (8:40) represent powerful
strategies to blend the mundane and transcendent dimensions.
Luna & Tarnovski (2017), documents a live performance with Czech musician Jara Tarnovski in front of a sleeping audience.
Laminares (Genot Centre, 2018) feels like a collection of odds and sodds.
The looping, cosmic crescendo of Nebulae stands out, but even that seems the result of facile algorithmic composition.
She relocated to Seattle to study digital arts at University of Washington.
Folksonomies (Cudighi, 2019) is music for
synthesizer, string instruments and nature recordings, but she
indulges too much in loops, which makes the music predictable and redundant.
The humble and lifeless I Smooth Claws stands out.
The 19-minute piece of Cepheid Variables (Longform Editions, 2019) is her
most subliminal composition yet, a feeble undulating vibration mixed with glitches that evoke ghostly apparitions.
The split album Laura Luna Castillo & Lensk (2019) contains her ten-minute Things Have Started To Float, a funereal monk-like drone
that slowly morphs into a cosmic
which in turn morphs into Bach-like organ chords.
Tuberose (Whited Sepulchre, 2020), ostensibly inspired by G.W. Septimus Piesse's book “The Art of Perfumery" (1857), is a collection of
elegant electronic vignettes. Her looping technique has evolved into something
meaningful, sort of post-minimalist repetitive patterns that become more alive
as they repeat. When Bruised Smells Like Peach Kernels is particularly
effective in this artform.
The melodic fragments and gamelan-like tones of Eight Pounds of Tuberose
and the crescendo that leads to the symphonic drones of This Process is Conducted Cold creates more pathos that cold algorithmic repetition besides
exploring subtle timbres and rhythms.
