Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City?

by Ale Hop

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Ruinas Arqueológicas, Agua dulce, Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City?, Havel River, The Life of Insects, Apophenia, and Bodiless. , and , .

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1.	The Mountain That Eats Men (collab. with Raul Jardín & Sukitoa o Namau) 08:24	buy track
2.	Mayu Islapi (collab. with Ana Quiroga, Fil Uno & Ignacio Briceño) 06:25	buy track
3.	Latitud 0 (collab. with Daniela Huerta & Manongo Mujica) 04:39	buy track
4.	They Thought of Themselves (collab. with Felicity Mangan & KMRU) 06:32	buy track
5.	Chiapas & Phinaya (collab. with Concepción Huerta & Tomas Tello) 06:51	buy track
6.	Once Upon a Time (collab. with Elsa M'Bala & Nicole L'Huillier) 05:34	buy track

about

The new album by the Peruvian-born / Berlin-based experimental artist Ale Hop was conceived in a context of immobility and provides six sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience. In collaboration with Ana Quiroga, Concepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M’bala, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño,
KMRU, Manongo Mujica, Moises Horta, Nicole L’huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau, Tomas Tello.

Following her explorations on music's inherent fixation to geographic space and time, be it through the longing of home ("Apophenia" 2019) or scientific magnification of invisible worlds ("The Life of Insects" 2020), Berlin-based Peruvian-born experimental composer Ale Hop's fourth album, "Why Is It They Say a City Like Any City?", was conceived in a context of immobility. During the lockdown months, she started a process of remote collaboration, by sending messages, posted from various cities along a South American trip, to thirteen musicians from around the world. She journaled her impressions upon these places to an intimate fictional character while reflecting on matters of time, sound, space, cosmology and colonial memory. The thirteen musicians dialogued with this voice by taking upon the challenge of responding to the messages with sound collaborations.

Field recordings, mouth drumming, drone cellos, electronic loops, arrhythmic rhythms and voices came back from this experiment. Ale assembled them, by layering, twisting and turning, into sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience, making it the first time she's set her guitar aside. Expect no answers to the album's title question, but an innermost psychedelic rumination.

"Despite the technological resources that appear to dilute distances, the simulation of closeness mirrored on the digital space is an emptied body, a state of precarity, a flat surface; unable to withhold an experience of exchange," Ale states. "So, I began this project by asking myself, how can we escape from the reduced experience of the virtual? The idea behind this experiment was that my messages and the places they describe could drive the composition, be a catalyzer, a score. Thus, to use geography as a tool to remember and imagine, to allow new soundscapes to emerge."

"Memory, diffuse and divergent, sometimes reaches out to the future in its search for form, taking shape from the reflections and echoes that come back … like throwing a rock in a pond and having a rock thrown back at you."

credits

released February 15, 2022

Produced and mixed by Ale Hop
Mastered and vinyl cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M, Berlin
Album illustrations by José Vera

Vinyl edition available from Karl Records:
karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/why-is-it-they-say-a-city-like-any-city

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Ale Hop Berlin, Germany

composer and instrumentalist

alehophop.com

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Nuits Sonores

Lyon, France

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