Leticia Castaneda: On the Verge of Redundance

C.I.P. continues its tradition of presenting the first release by new and emerging artists with the release of Leticia Castaneda¹s On the Verge of Redundance. Leticia is a sound artist from southern CA whose deft compositions of field recordings, bedroom manipulations, iso booth experiments, and simple self-built circuits bring an elegant and enjoyable "quiet" contribution to the C.I.P. roster. In her own words, "a sustained focus while composing is to slow the breath of the listener. Silence is a prelude to eruption and realization. Shifting sine, curious creeks, patient tone remains. Colourful audio digestion, sometimes stagnant, (hence the title), sometimes vigorous." Drawing inspiration from classical modern electronic composition, Leticia offers a palette of audio explorations that carry on the tradition of new electronic music and will reward the discerning listener.

"'Inspired by Sirrus, sarcasm and Santa Barbara,' it says inside the sleeve—and that's not the only inscrutable thing about this outing from California-based sound artist Castaneda. A brief Google reveals evidence of activity in several domains associated with contemporary sound art, notably installations and site-specific events, but there's a richness and warmth to Castaneda's work that recalls an earlier generation of analogue pioneers; the hard-panned gurgles and swoops of 'Crayon Salad and a Glass of Wine' bring to mind the pioneering works of Maxfield, Sender, Subotnick and Oliveros. In the splendidly-titled 'Memories of Being Lost', source sounds—some purely electronic, some field recordings, some more easily identifiable than others, but all fascinating—emerge, are looped, and recede into the background. There's not a glitch in sight; unlike much contemporary electronica, which makes little or no effort to cover up traces of the software used to produce it, Castaneda is more interested in the what than in the how. The predominantly serious tone set by the opening 'A Dot Concoction' is retained and intensified during the album, especially in the sombre Radigue-like (again) "Statue". Even behind the machine-like bustle of activity of the closing "Untitled 1", a discreet but ever-present drone anchors the music. An impressive debut."--Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlatic Review

Following the lineage of absurd electronics set forth by the Los Angeles Free Music Society, California sound artist Leticia Castaneda revels in a thrift store brutism that engages the aesthetic of musique concrete with a lo-fi sensibility. The title of her debut album works well as a pithy poetic statement and also identifies a compositional strategy of subtle disorientation. The album's first few selections embrace the conceptual formulae as manneristic bell tones devolve into artificial squelches of ring modulated resonance. Sputnik bleeps punctuate her spartan soundfield of jump-cut detours, field recordings, and clipped samples. Later on, Castaneda shifts her focus to longer, immersive pieces of homebrewed minimalism, in which tinny drones of magnetic vibrations evolve into monolithic slabs of motorized sound. Teasingly close to blank stagnation, these pieces maintain her logistical concerns, as slivers of feedback, sci-f vibrato, and wildly flanging effects slither throughout her monochromastism.--Jim Haynes, Wire 248

In this day and age it becomes more and more difficult to put new artists on the market, but Crippled Intellect is one of those rare labels who actually keep on trying. They now come up with Leticia Castaneda, who hails from Los Angeles and plays her music live with people from Solid Eye and the Los Angeles Free Music Society. This is her very first CD and it turned out to be a great one. Her music stands in the tradition of musique concrete recordings of the sixties and seventies, but maybe with today's technology. That is something of importance to realize since some of the material hoovers at a low volume level. She uses organ sounds next to the amplified sources of say a comb and crafts five delicate pieces together. Each of these five compositions is a pleasure to hear, with the Lopezian 'Statue' as the most radical encounter here.--Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

Launching itself headlong into a vale of twittering and resonant bells, a bowed device bisects the sound every few minutes or so, fading into a field of thrumming bass flowers blossoming suddenly and catching the listener unaware. The effect is not unlike walking through different seasons and finding that in fact fall and autumn are completely disparate entities. It's a jumble (that scrambled work game) of sounds that one expects appeal to Castaneda in wildly different ways‹a rolodex of things heard that she returns to occasionally, pulling one out, mulling over another. It¹s an odd duck that quacks and walks and sounds like a Kray supercomputer at points; it¹s also somehow a rather stately beast that will age well over time, serving as a guidepost for things as they were "back then," and its not for nothing that the key track on this album is called "Memories of Being Lost." For those working with more difficult, left field forms of sound, listening almost supersedes the sense of smell as a clear window to one¹s past; for Castaneda it is doubtless that significant moments in her life and adventures appear in the final mix of these pieces--passages, really. For as intensely public as is having a record--any record--released into the world, inside the 0s and 1s are her immensely personal moments, shielded from view or key or widely yawning CD player.--David Cotner, Signal to Noise, April 2006