Nocturnal & Circular Images Op. 5, the "Behind the Scenes"

Independent record label, Irreverence Group Music - IGM presents: Nocturnal and circular images Op. 5 - The behind the Scenes. Exclusive and raw images about the album's recording and some intimate moments with composer and pianist Julián De La Chica. Featuring tracks like Fado, introspective, Etude and others, De La Chica gives us his thoughts on minimalism, being a composer today and some of his inspirations in life and in music.

The Music

New York based, Colombian pianist and composer Julián De La Chica wrote the Nocturnal & Circular images Op. 5 in 2014 which premiered in December 2014 a the Saint Joseph’s Brooklyn Cathedral. The Cycle Op. 5 is a group of 10 pieces written for the piano, inspired by different night scenes, situations and/or characters. The work suggests a direct relationship between everyday sound and inner images that we create or concoct. The work contains a simple and clean composition form, notes that repeat indefinitely, raw and free textures and static harmonic cycles. In this work, Mr. De La Chica continues the series that began in 2011 with the cycle Op. 4, in which he experimented with genres such as Latin, hip hop, techno and pop, creating 11 night-time images based on situations that happened in New York City.

Julián De La Chica
Photo by Hassan Malik

In the Cycle Op. 5, Mr. De La Chica seeks to strip the piano bare, reaching a sound that is void of interpretative recourse. Musicologist, composer and writer Susan Campos - Fonseca refers to the work as "ascetic" in her musings on "musical excess" and, in discussing the music of De La Chica, speaks of a "Trans-minimal aggression". According to Ms. Campos - Fonseca: “Listening from this perspective can be daunting to the contemporary ear; the idea of complexity as synonymous with quality, the saturation of the sound landscape and productions that represent the so-called post-post-symphonic great culture deafen us ... why? The reason lies in our need for saturation, rational self-complacency in excess, in the spectacle where nudity is not enough, where open flesh and blood, even death, do not sate us. No, we will not find that in the music of Julián De La Chica. It is writ large across the works that make up this experience: the aggression of the minimum lies there"...

Composer Julián de la Chica & Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio, Yonkers, NY
Photo by Hassan Malik

Album Notes

Julián De La Chica considers himself to be an "experimenter”, not a "composer". However, he composes a micro-universe from naked atomic sound. The skin is a set of pores traversed by particles of world. The music De La Chica explores the liminal atomic spaces between these pores and the world.

The Cycle Op. 5 shown in this album does not speak of the ‪‎Colombian‬ composer living in New York city; It is a pilgrimage. The piano is the only trace of this journey of identity which is, in short, destruction. The inner sound, is the deepest for those who create from the musical abyss. Sound culture around us weaves nets like mermaid songs and Penelope mantles ... he who seeks his sound needs to choose; and home is not always Ithaca.

Julián De La Chica, as Samuel Beckett, knows that companionship is being "alone" and, as in the nighttime images of William Blake, speaks of the unfathomable path with the smallest gesture of a human hand. In his Cycle Op. 5, De La Chica opens the "metaphysical box" called piano‬, which imagined ‪Oteiza‬, like a beloved body, sole companion, minimum.

Susan Campos - Fonseca, PhD
Musicologist and composer.

the artist

Julián De La Chica is a Colombian composer, pianist and record producer based in Brooklyn, NY, whose influences range from American minimalism to the alternative and electronic scene. His work, most of the time inspired by everyday images, the search of personal spiritual reflection and the inner darkness, mixes piano, strings, and classical singers, with electronic keyboards and controllers, crossing over from classical to ambient/electronic music.

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