Spheres. ISZ -Miguel Isaza-
(Audiotalaia 2012)

Review by John McEnroe

Miguel Isaza is a sound artist from Medellin, Colombia and ISZ is a ‘electroacustic’ project where he captures sounds and processes them to generate a ‘new reality’. I have been following this project from some time now and could say that in ‘Spheres’ he managed to accomplish some of his best results in terms of re-creating this sense of reality.

Although it’s clear that we are in front of a work that ranges from electroacoustic to concrete, the materiality and spatiality of ‘Spheres’ is somehow believable even though certain sonorities remind us that we are in front of this ‘other’ reality where the electronic and digital means seems to be a structural part of how things are built.

A fact that I find relevant here is that Miguel Isaza is very interested in sound design for films and mentions Walter Murch’s work as a subject of particular interest. I mention this because the works he publishes under his ISZ project, and ‘Spheres’ in particular, have a strong cinematographic character where a narrative is built through a series of events that the listener could link on the timeline and that build a very strong emotional content as the piece develops. This sense of narrative is built under a micro-macro approach: motion and change are there expressed  though a very effective use of natural and generated reverberations, textures and objects and the formal development of this aspects set up a very effective universal character, where there is a sense of wholeness and a sense of detail.

On “Spheres’ when wholeness and detail interact they manage to tell a story where emotions leads to images rather than the other way around: images of resonances, volumes, spatialities and sufraces that the listener could perceptually build through a very meaningful experience. For the people interested on the more concrete and electroacoustic ends of field recordings based composition ‘Spheres’ is a very rewarding listen.

[Miguel Isaza, photo courtesy of Fundación Cuatro-Dieciocho]

Miguel Isaza website
Audiotalaia website