In December of 1981, high in the
mountains of El Salvador, in a little town called El Mozote, a whole town was destroyed by
the most elite battalion of the Salvadorean army. They left nobody alive, not even the
children. This event was kept secret for many years, denied by the right wing government
of El Salvador and by the U.S. Government as well. As the years passed by, the evidence
accumulated and eventually the mass graves were uncovered.
In January of 1995, I was asked to write some kind of
music that would describe those forces. The result was a 45 minute long electroacoustic
piece that aims at going beyond the statistics and the rhetoric towards a fuller
understanding (mental, emotional and physical) of what happened at El Mozote. In the
piece, samples and electronic sounds combine with acoustic guitars and newscasts from the
war, all collaborating to take the listener in a journey from the safety of the present to
a forgotten moment in recent history when the deepest and darkest forces of the human
heart were unleashed.
My musical influences range from the Orb, Aphex Twin,
Bill Laswell, Hearts of Space, FSOL and DJ Spooky to composers such as Stockhausen,
Debussy, John Cage and Philip Glass.
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