LP – BEMIS

In Languages ​​as Art: Documentary History of Broadcasting: 1920-1950 Juanjosé Rivas uses techniques of appropriation, remixing and sampling to extrapolate the sounds and textual sources that form a new critical and auditory construct on the theme of language and power. Roland Barthes defined the “discourse of power” as “any discourse that gives rise to a sense of guilt”, and specified that the object in which “the power of every human eternity is inscribed is: language, or to be more precise, its obligatory expression: the tongue”. The art of language, Juanjosé Rivas emphasizes, could be a pleonasm or an aphorism that seeks to hide and embellish the powerful artifice of the word. “Language, speech and dialect tend to be seen as inferior: the mother tongue, a babble; native language; indigenous dialects. They all come before the fight, before the conquest, before the clash with power.” It is still an artifice of language that makes Rivas say that “this album does not correspond to any musical work, not even in its most experimental sense”, thus emphasizing an antagonistic, deconstructionist, playful and even combinatorial approach, which requires the listener to make contact physical with the work. There is a whole tradition, however, that reminds us how much this technique can be called musical in its own right: this is the ‘plunderphonics’ school founded by John Oswald, which makes sound editing the backbone of a musical project , without worrying that the sources used are recognisable. Language has always been one of the great ideological and governmental forces of every dictatorial regime, and the ability to unhinge every relationship that language creates expresses the possibility of a new and different way of observing, reworking and structuring things, what, in other words, we might call “our vision of the world”. In GROAR, Juanjosé Rivas displays great skill destroying, grasping for and playing with words, filling the pre-existing linguistic order with new connections, manipulating what can’t be erased: silences, spaces, whispers and rhythm, together with the sounds that he reformulates without disengaging from improvisation as the main resource.

 

Juanjosé Rivas – GROAR