Release Date: 28 October 2022
Jimena Maldonado (b.1988) is a Mexican composer living in the UK and the Netherlands. She uses her experience as a photographer to experiment with the relationship between music and visual elements. Her work explores the way that music and image interact and influence each other and how this relationship affects the perceptions of both performer and audience.
Intervened Memory is a large scale piece for viola da gamba and electronics based on Mexican artist Cristian Pineda’s Yo soy mi casa [I am my house], a series of ten photographs that have been digitally overlaid with drawings. These poignant images were taken in Juchitán, Oaxaca after catastrophic earthquakes in September 2017. Pineda’s digital interventions ‘repopulate’ the images with graffiti-like doodles whose fantastical iconography – strange beasts, abundant plant life, disembodied eyes and limbs – recalls traditional Zapotec art. Now Maldonado undertakes musical interventions upon these images that evoke memory and nostalgia through electronic loops and canons, drones and percussive textures, environmental sounds and electronic feedback.
“Intervened Memory is delicate, tender and respectful, a reflection of the processes, instruments and people that made it.” – Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Jimena Maldonado’s music has been performed throughout the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and continental Europe by ensembles such as Quatuor Bozzini, Ligeti Quartet, Orkest de Ereprijs, and Cuarteto José White. In 2020 she was the recipient of National Sawdust’s Hildegard Commission.
Check out Cristian Pineda's poignant images here
Read an article by sociologist Pascale Naveua about the album here
AUDIO
RECORDING CREDITS
Juan Luis Montoro Electronics composition
Israel Castillo Viola da gamba
Recorded at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in February 2021
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Reiss Smith
Catalogue Number: BRC017