Huerta Ensamble, “S∞S” (Elevator Bath, 2026)
This new “collaborative research project” by Mexican artists Concepción and Daniela Huerta is their first recorded collaboration, but the two artists have been working together ever since they first met a few years ago and discovered a shared sensibility. Of the two, I am more familiar with The Hague-based Concepción, who is a photographer, synthesist, tape artist and member of Mabe Fratti’s Amor Muere ensemble. The Berlin-based Daniela is a multimedia artist, sound designer, and DJ (as Baby Vulture) who has worked with artists like Lucrecia Dalt, Ash Fure, and Ale Hop. Both have released excellent solo albums in roughly the same vein as this one, but this improv-driven session recorded over the course of a single day seems to bring out the best of both artists. While I have no idea if S∞S is the culmination of years of exchanged ideas or if it simply bloomed over the course of one magical day, it is undeniably an intense and absolutely mesmerizing tour de force of heavy and hallucinatory industrial-inspired drone.
The album is composed of two side-long halves of a “lush electronic symphony,” both created from a palette of synth, voice, and magnetic tape. Notably, however, both artists are quite cerebral and concept-driven, so the instrumentation involved is secondary to the duo’s deep and overarching interests in spatiality, psychoacoustics, and treating sound as a living organism. Fittingly, the infinity symbol in the album’s title is intended to represent “a reciprocal flow of energy: a continuous exchange of sonic forces, sympathetic vibration, and interconnected life, echoing the ouroboros and its eternal cycle.” I suppose the same could be said of all fine multi-artist improvisations, yet those words pack a lot more weight when the result feels like an otherworldly elemental force is being unleashed upon the world.
In the opening “∞ al vacío,” rattling swells and whines, spacy streaks, drones, and jangling subterranean tones gradually cohere into an absolutely gorgeous motif of seesawing, frayed, and flickering chords. While the warm and sublime ambiance of those chords are the heart and soul of the piece, that does not stop them from being enveloped in a visceral and nightmarish crescendo of buzzing industrial drones, but that storm eventually passes to reveal a similarly beautiful final act. In the piece’s final moments, the harshness fades away and it feels like heavy industrial machinery has become sentient and soulful, as deep. undulating drones are joined by cosmic exhalations, the sounds of time-stretched church bells, and cresting waves of hiss in a murky sea of dream drones. While it admittedly takes a few minutes to truly catch fire, “∞ al vacío” blossoms into an absolutely immense and vividly immersive masterpiece of shapeshifting drones once everything comes together.
On the flipside, “∞ sincronia” opens as a more traditional drone piece, as a deep bass throb slowly flanges while hazy strings drift in and out of focus and audibility. Around the 4-minute mark, however, a new breed of drone appears and the piece becomes a viscous and undulating futuristic nightmare. Things quickly get even uglier from there, as the heaving drones are joined by howling and rattling strings en route to a passage that feels like it is getting sucked through a black hole: sounds become incredibly dense, stretched, shuddering, and immense as the Huertas descended fully into the blackest cosmic horror. Yet again, however, the storm eventually passes to leave behind something unexpected and eerily beautiful, as haunted drones spatially reverberate around a cavernous space and lapping waves of warm drones slowly emerge from what sounds like a ruined landscape of collapsing buildings.
Of the two pieces, I was most blown away by the less intense and harrowing “∞ al vacío,” but both of these pieces are serious fucking business. Aside from the sheer immensity and organic unpredictability of these pieces, I was quite impressed at how effectively the Huertas were able to make dark and heavy drone music while avoiding simple repetition and most hackneyed dark ambient tropes, which I suppose makes Elevator Bath the perfect home for this seething and crushing wonder of slow-burning sound design mastery.
Listen here.
