There is something almost perversely appropriate about making a forty-three-minute electronic composition during lockdown and deciding that its principal subject should be persistence. Humanity had temporarily discovered that time could become a viscous substance, that Tuesdays could last approximately three geological eras, and that staring at the same four walls was apparently an acceptable lifestyle. Solís Arenazas responded by asking what happens when sound refuses to leave. "Conatus" is the answer.

The word comes from Spinoza's notion of the fundamental tendency of every being to persevere in its existence, to continue being what it is while simultaneously entering into relations that inevitably alter it. Solís Arenazas does not merely borrow this idea as an intellectual ornament. He builds the entire piece around it. A small number of sonic materials persist for an extended duration, repeating without ever remaining perfectly identical. Their survival depends on change. That distinction is crucial.

A loop normally promises recurrence: here we are again, back at the beginning, congratulations, humanity has invented the circle. But "Conatus" is interested in a less obedient kind of repetition. Its materials return altered by their previous encounters. Frequencies interfere, textures thicken or thin, microscopic deviations accumulate. What initially appears static gradually reveals itself as a system in continuous negotiation with itself.

This is also where Solís Arenazas' wider practice becomes relevant. The Mexico City-based sound artist, essayist and composer works across electroacoustic music, synthesis, acousmatic research, installations, radio and documentary sound, with a recurring interest in ambiguity, language and the behaviour of indeterminate materials. His work has appeared in contexts ranging from contemporary dance and film to sound installations and experimental music. His 2026 LINE release "Displacements", for example, explores relationships between language, chaotic systems and randomness through feedback, noise, field recordings and electronic processes. "Conatus" approaches similar territory from a considerably narrower doorway. Everything happens inside a single piece. That could sound restrictive. It isn't. The forty-three minutes function less like a conventional composition than like a laboratory in which a handful of sounds are left alone long enough to reveal their bad habits. The materials were originally recorded at Vano Sonoro's studios in Mexico City in early 2021, then subjected to processes involving Markov-chain probability, interference modulation, low-frequency oscillation and resampling. But the interesting thing is not the technology itself. It is the composer's decision to listen before intervening.

The procedure is almost anti-virtuosic. Instead of constantly demonstrating control, Solís Arenazas allows the system to produce unexpected consequences and then responds to them. Parameters are adjusted sparingly. The composer becomes partly gardener, partly scientist, partly person sitting in front of a computer wondering whether that strange sound was intentional. It is a productive relinquishing of authority. The piece consequently develops through tiny discrepancies. A tone that initially seems merely functional begins acquiring grain. A pulse creates secondary vibrations. One frequency appears to lean against another. A texture thickens enough to become almost architectural before gradually losing its solidity. The listener's attention is repeatedly redirected from the object itself toward the space around it. This is where "Conatus" becomes genuinely compelling. Its repetition is not about hypnosis in the conventional ambient sense. It is about "perceptual recalibration". The longer the same materials remain present, the more aggressively the ear starts examining them. What sounded like a single event becomes a cluster of internal movements. What seemed motionless begins crawling.

There is a beautiful paradox here: the music changes because it insists on remaining itself. Spinoza would probably approve. Or at least he might have found the premise less ridiculous than most things humans do with synthesizers. The piece also has an interesting relationship with the experience of lockdown without attempting to turn itself into a pandemic document. There are no obvious gestures toward catastrophe, isolation or collective trauma. Instead, the connection is temporal. "Conatus" remembers a period in which duration became unusually conspicuous. Ordinary time lost its usual punctuation. Days ceased to be differentiated by events and became quantities of waiting. Solís Arenazas translates that experience into sound without narrating it.

The result is not music about lockdown so much as music that understands what it meant for time to become materially noticeable. At first, forty-three minutes can seem like an extravagant amount of time to ask from a listener. By the end, the opposite becomes true. The duration feels necessary because the composition needs enough temporal distance for its smallest deviations to become significant. This is the great risk of such music, naturally. Minimalism can easily become minimal effort wearing a serious expression. Put a drone on for forty minutes, mention phenomenology somewhere in the accompanying text and humanity will occasionally reward you for it.

"Conatus" earns its duration because the repetition contains consequences. Its materials do not simply persist. They remember.

Every recurrence carries traces of what happened before. The sonic environment therefore becomes cumulative rather than cyclical. The listener is never returned to precisely the same point, even when the surface suggests otherwise. The piece behaves more like a spiral than a loop, gradually circling the same territory while changing its altitude.

There is also something quietly physical about the music. The low-frequency components and interference processes give the piece a sense of pressure. It does not merely occupy listening space; it modifies the perception of that space. Headphones make this particularly evident, because the apparently modest events begin revealing depth and lateral movement that the first pass may have concealed. This is perhaps the most successful aspect of "Conatus": its ability to turn small differences into events.

Nothing needs to explode. Nothing needs to announce a climax. There is no heroic final transformation waiting patiently at minute forty-two. Instead, the reward lies in discovering that the supposedly identical thing has been changing all along. That idea extends beyond music. A person repeats habits and remains recognisably themselves, yet is altered by every repetition. A relationship returns to familiar gestures but never to the same circumstances. A memory resurfaces with a slightly different emphasis. Even an apparently stable identity is continuously modified by its encounters.

Persistence is therefore not the opposite of change. Persistence is one of the mechanisms through which change happens.

That is what gives "Conatus" its philosophical weight without requiring it to behave like a philosophy lecture with a synthesizer underneath. The Spinozist premise is useful because it is audible. You can hear the materials trying to remain themselves. You can also hear them failing, which is arguably the more interesting part.

The piece ends, but it does not feel concluded in any conventional sense. It simply reaches the point at which the listener is released from the experiment. The processes could presumably continue. The sounds could keep modifying one another indefinitely. And perhaps that is the final trick.

"Conatus" makes us aware that repetition is never really repetition. There is always another microscopic difference waiting inside the return, another accidental relation, another mutation too small to notice until we have stayed still long enough.

In a culture addicted to novelty, Solís Arenazas proposes something considerably stranger: stay with the same thing until it becomes something else.

It turns out that patience, unlike most fashionable production techniques, still has consequences.