Some artists age into refinement. Others into irrelevance. Beatriz Ferreyra seems to have taken a less convenient route: she just kept listening more closely than everyone else.
"Huellas Entreveradas" feels less like a release and more like a quiet assertion that the old laboratory of sound - tape, fragments, accidents, patience - never really closed. It just became unfashionable for a while, which is not the same thing. Ferreyra, who passed through the orbit of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in the 1960s, belongs to that rare lineage of composers who treat sound not as material to be arranged, but as something to be interrogated, coaxed, occasionally tricked into revealing its inner life.
The three pieces collected here span decades, but time behaves strangely inside them. The title work, "Huellas Entreveradas", unfolds like a cartography of memory that refuses to stabilize. Voices, percussive traces, and flickers of flute don’t so much move through space as destabilize it. You think you’re following a path, then the path dissolves, then it reappears behind you, slightly altered, as if your own listening had already contaminated it. Comparisons to Iannis Xenakis or Karlheinz Stockhausen are inevitable, but also slightly beside the point. Where they often impose structure like architecture, Ferreyra lets it emerge like weather.
Then, without warning, "La Baballe du Chien-Chien" arrives and quietly dismantles any expectation of severity. A piece dedicated, with disarming sincerity, to dogs and grandmothers should by all rights collapse into whimsy. Instead, it becomes something stranger: a study in play that takes play seriously. Sonic gestures bounce, collide, disappear, return in altered forms, like a game whose rules are never explained but somehow understood. There’s humor here, but it’s not decorative. It’s structural. You begin to suspect that curiosity, not rigor, might be the real discipline.
The closing miniature, "Deux Dents Dehors", is almost mischievous in its brevity. A nod to Bernard Parmegiani, it feels like a compressed conversation between generations: affectionate, slightly irreverent, and entirely unconcerned with monumentality. Four minutes, no grand statement, just a quick flash of teeth.
What makes this album quietly radical is not its adherence to musique concrète techniques, but its refusal to treat them as heritage. There is no sense of preservation here, no curatorial anxiety. Ferreyra doesn’t honor the tradition; she inhabits it, reshapes it, occasionally pokes fun at it. The sounds remain tactile, almost stubbornly physical, even when they drift into abstraction. You hear surfaces, frictions, tiny collisions that feel improbably alive.
In a contemporary landscape where experimental music often arrives wrapped in theory, branding, or carefully managed obscurity, "Huellas Entreveradas" does something more unsettling: it trusts listening itself. No instructions, no conceptual safety net. Just the faint suspicion that, if you pay attention long enough, the sounds might begin to recognize you back.
Not a comfortable idea, but then again, neither is memory.