Introduction

I assume minimalism as an asceticism. The Mexican duo ChaTo (Julio Torres and Pablo Chavarría) is characterized by choosing not to seek an extratemporal transendence in their live performances. For them, the instant is the only thing that exists: like a mandala, it is built to later be erased. Between the three of us, what we make is and is erased in improvisation; in its becoming, it is resonance and its fragility. As a trio, we base our work on this break. But, “what is it that is broken? What is that precious object that we want to preserve?” Torres asks. “The process of reaching the breaking point, an emptiness, like a cinematographic suicide in each work”, Chavarría responds.

Everything we live in is a construction (boxes, living in boxes, in pre-decided choices), why not break them?  “Experimentation,” the “avant-garde” or “advanced music,” are terms that are worn, constructed according to canons. The individual states of those who create beneath these principles as a break are dissimilar: therein lies the play of improvisation and experimentation.

We decide to accept this challenge, working from the principle of texture, and from a rhythmic flow that we understand as “shamanic,” in the sense of a decolonial performativity of silence.  Like the shout of fear of the colonized, and in its turn, quoting Laura Romero, like: “The shamanic ability [that] exists in perceiving and seeing that which is absent and hearing what the silence reveals.” 

We choose to take the risk of Zone of Silence, a single concert that will be recorded live to submerge ourselves in time without measure, unspecialized, without a grid… Time without number, where every instant, as Henri Bergson suggests, is an aging abyss. This species of sonorous suicide is sought in a time open to flows and different gradations of intensity. ChaTo works with sensorial camps found in rock and punk; from that sonority they are immersed in a sound body. Added to this is my performance, which joins minimalism and aleatory. Nobody establishes the tempo, various flows of time coexist. Nothing is foreseen, dispersion moves us, and in it, we touch.

Listening She Knows Live at Na Bolom is a created zone, composed of an “us” by the public, the space, and the historical memory of the space. There is no emptiness, nor negation, nor absence; it is a silence as a possibility of opening yourself to something. The principle of the body, the silent shout – preserved on the cover of the single, a work by the Mexican photographer Efraín Ascencio Cedillo – refers to the visceral, the corporeal, to a furious music that is at the same time contemplative, possible in improvisation.  Like an animal that is dying, that’s life is still there, that exhales in a manner unforeseeable.