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Octophonic performances:

Ye Ixquich Cahuitl (2021)

The title of this work is in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexicas and other Indigenous cultures in central Mexico, still spoken these days by few people. in Spanish it means, "todo este tiempo ha", in English, “all this time has” and it alludes to the 500 years (half millennia) of the Spanish conquest over the Aztec culture in the city of Tenochtitlan in 1521. The title is also connected to the Náhuatl word Cahuitl (Time), which is at the same time register, accumulation of past memory. Cáhuitl is also Sonic time. Synthetizing in less than an hour the history of Mexican indigenous, creole and half-blood culture in a sound work seems almost impossible. The central idea of this sound work was based in the different strata, both geological (nature) and anthropological (pyramids, catholic sanctuaries and churches, modern buildings) of our culture. Our syncretic nature disintegrates us in many bits and pieces conformed by different cultures ¿What is the identity of Mexicans? Maybe only the deconstruction of the different eras of our history, in a kind of a sonic abstract scrap, can bring us closer to a possible essence, or a possible holistic field that nonetheless will always be structured by extreme dualities: life-death, sacrifice (violence)–abstinence, indigenism–Europeanism, the real world–the divine world, old and modern life forms.
There is a continuous and constant base of this sound work where different events occur, it is the lowest and deepest strata, namely, the ancient indigenous world that in an integral way is only preserved in the codices, myths, in the stories, present traditions, and in the pre-Columbian objects (including musical instruments), but also in the different indigenous languages that subsist in Mexico, 68 languages, although only 10 of them are spoken by the majority of indigenous people in my country (about 10% of the population).
This work is made out of many of these languages, but it is also a chronological time line that jumps from the pre-Columbian era before the Spaniards came, jumping later into the modern and contemporary world of the XIX, XX and XI centuries, where I use the sounds of street vendors in the big cities, as well as other urban sounds like traffic, wrestling (lucha libre) political marches, etc. Sounds that in a way are very similar to the sounds of the grate Tenochtitlan, the biggest city of the world at that time. I also allude to the ancient music, and then to the contemporary popular music played today, as well as to the present indigenous music in different rituals (fiestas religiosas) all across the country.
Despite my historical criticism to the various attempts to revive a pre-Columbian and “inexistent” music by Mexican Musical Nationalism in the last century, the post Columbian New Age, and one or another nostalgic sound artist, I have inevitably fallen in the same quagmire hoping to save the situation, because this vision of the Anahuac that the Spaniard Conquerors had 500 years ago, is a kind of mythical dream that we still want to apprehend, trying to look to ourselves in that dark mirror of the sorcerer Tezcatlipoca, to try to recognize us.
Ye Ixquich Cahuitl was a commission from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2021, 500 years after the confrontation of Europe and America in Mexico, but it was premiered in October 2022 du to the pandemic.