Camilo Méndez: Peripheral Spaces

Camilo Méndez's music is a melting pot in which a seemingly disparate mix of influences blends into harmonious, coherent works of monumental proportions. It draws inspiration from literature and visual arts, geography and philosophy, and experiences gained on several continents. While Méndez's sound world has an undeniable affinity with that of European composers such as Helmut Lachenmann and his mentors Pierluigi Billone and Rebecca Saunders, the conceptual basis of his works is filled with allusions to composers, writers, and visual artists from his native Latin America and subtle references to his own professional endeavors and artistic collaborations in North America and Southeast Asia.
Just as the works blend countless influences, they also combine instruments in ever-surprising ways. Méndez alienates them through “preparations” and unconventional playing techniques, blurring their boundaries and combining their sounds in astonishing and enchanting ways. In Méndez's music, the unexpected is the norm: cellos produce sounds that are indistinguishable from flutes, pianos are treated as percussion instruments, accordions and saxophones produce interchangeable timbres. Through these unlikely transformations and blends of instrumental sounds, Méndez transforms chamber ensembles into fantastic machines that create otherworldly soundscapes and hum rhythmically with the precision of finely tuned mechanisms. Méndez's works are conceived as large cycles that explore a compositional idea across several pieces, each written for a different combination of instruments. The macrostructure of each cycle is carefully thought out, with intricate (often symmetrical) arrangements of the pieces according to their instrumentation and sometimes using sophisticated devices such as pieces that can be played simultaneously. Each cycle can be presented as a complete concert, but the individual pieces are also stand-alone works that can be performed on their own. This album contains six excerpts from two cycles—BURSZTYN and Spatio-Temporal Cartographies—in the characteristic macrostructural form favored by Méndez.