Latencia [LP]

Microhm & Imaabs - Latencia [LP]

“Latencia” is a collaborative project by Microhm (MX) and Imaabs (CL), developed through the listening of field recordings of soundscapes and traditional music held in the archives of Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, together with contemporary electronic production processes. The album explores the sonic memory of Mexico and Latin America through speculative sound research, in which archive, territory, and technology intersect as unstable layers of the same materiality. A central idea emerged during the research process: many of the sounds we now understand as traditional originated through cultural exchange, displacement, and the convergence of sonorities, rhythms, and musical forms from different regions and cultures. Indigenous, African, European, and Latin American influences were transformed and segmented across the territories of Mexico, becoming complex, hybrid soundscapes in a constant state of flux. From this reflection, the album proposes a sonic fiction: a series of imagined landscapes constructed from fragments of memory, archival echoes, and cultural resonances that exist within a territory that is at once ambivalent, singular, and multiple. Within this space, traditional sounds are reconfigured, slowed down, and transformed through electro-digital processes. What may once have referred to a recognizable source becomes suspended atmosphere, diffuse rhythm, and liminal space. Listening moves between the familiar and that which cannot be precisely located: a latent presence that resists being fixed as document, root, or stable identity. “Latencia” does not attempt to answer what defines a Latin American or Mexican musical identity. Instead, it proposes inhabiting and embodying its contradictions, mixtures, and zones of indeterminacy: listening to tradition not as a pure origin, but as a living archive, a field of friction, and material open to new forms of sonic imagination and speculation. “Latencia” is the result of a commission by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture for the composition of the music for the “Original 2025: Mexican Textile Art Gathering”. From this larger body of work, eleven tracks were selected to form the album, with 8 tracks on the vinyl album. A1. Cauce A2. Lluvia Negra A3. Pueblo Hundido A4. Casa Vacia B1. Vestigio B2. Temporal B3. Ruina B4. El Rumor