DEBUT ALBUM BY ALFREDO SANTA ANA
Nightscape
RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 5, 2021
"moody and gripping...a dynamic and highly palatable story, which nicely breaks expectation regularly. it feels over too soon, in a good way, making me want to go back and listen again."
-MICHAEL RED
souns / la fe / chambers / low indigo
[VANCOUVER, BC—SEPTEMBER 9, 2021] Composer Alfredo Santa Ana releases Nightscape, his debut album of ambient electronic music. Available for purchase and streaming on all digital platforms on October 5 and ready for pre-order September 21. A Canadian pressing of 200 copies of Nightscape will be offered in a limited edition 180-gram 12" vinyl LP.
I wrote most of this album during the Fall of 2020, composing in quick spurts of creativity, over nights that grew longer and darker, writing during the hours after midnight when I struggled sleeping. The city was often quiet, but also alert and listening, which inspired me to write about themes of isolation, the unknown, and the forgotten. I was drawn to creating this album in a new and personal way, unmediated by performance—music from me to the listener directly—away from daytime influences. The work grew and turned into a labour of piecing together these musical bursts, which combined, stretched out like those lengthening nights.
ALBUM DESCRIPTION
A carefully organized collection of acoustic artifacts, Nightscape slowly unfolds over 17 tracks as a gathering of echoes and messages from an unknown or alternate timeline. It is music that can be experienced as accompaniment to a nocturnal expedition through an abandoned city, where the listener finds the vanishing sounds of out-of-tune pianos, birds, organs, voices, bells, trumpets, and drum machines. The musical aesthetic on the album focuses on nostalgia, isolation, and time, with each track combining layers of notated and quasi-improvised musical material into a dark chamber-like electronic suite of disquieting miniatures. Gradually, the music of Nightscape folds into a communion with the uncertainty that inspired it, suggesting that sometimes, even after dawn, the night is still present.
Nightscape is available for purchase and streaming on all digital platforms October 5, 2021.
A NOTE ON THE USE OF SAMPLES
All recorded sound is by the nature of its technological capture a form of detachment from its original source. In Nightscape, the music reflects and further engages with this idea, aspiring to create a listening space in which the listener not only recognizes familiar sound objects but can also perceive their ‘out of time-ness’ or temporal disjunction as a way of creating a new meaning for them within the music. As the listener encounters the different voices of poets (Pilgrimage, Abandon all previous strategies…, Lost Future), old film dialogue (Signals), and lost family members (Lose Contact), the post-ambient-acousmatic-spoken-word soundscape explores new and imagined origins for these recordings. The voices in the album, along with the mix of chosen sampled instruments, creates an uncanny scattering of presences, each sound performs a role beyond that of playing notes or musical gestures. Rather than fixing the source of these voices and samples to exist within a single, original context, the music of Nightscape sets them up to re-possess a new and imagined origin, a haunting of the dream-like music—the perfect aural backdrop to an ontological night journey.
ALBUM TRACK LIST
Alfredo Santa Ana
Nightscape
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It's in the Soil 1
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Echoes from a Vanishing Paracosm
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Roleplay
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Night Vessel
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Lose Contact
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Peacock
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Pilgrimage
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The Introvert
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Blooming Dark
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Lights on!
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Signals
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Lifting the Veil
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Abandon all previous strategies...
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Inner Migration
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The Last Hymn
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Lost Future
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It's in the Soil 2
Available for pre-order now in a limited edition Canadian pressing of 200 units as a 180-gram 12" vinyl LP.
 Front - "Grey" |
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 Front |
 Back - "Black"6-83EE-479C-82BA-C51F097FFDD6_1_201_a |
 Back & Front |
 Front - "Black" |
ALBUM CREDITS
Music by Alfredo Santa Ana
Poetry and spoken word by
Alfredo Gonzalez Bouret, Colin Browne, Alisen Santa Ana, and Luis J. Rodriguez
Performed, produced, and mixed by Alfredo Santa Ana
Mastering by Andrew Spindor at Railtown Mastering
Album Art Direction by Dirk Wright
Audio excerpts courtesy of ITV Archive/Powell & Pressburger, and Claudia Chan Shaw. Poetry by Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez from Trochemoche: Poems, Curbstone Press, courtesy of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, NY and Lamy, NM, all rights reserved.
ASA Records - ASA01
October 5, 2021
Nightscape was recorded between July and November of 2020 on the ancestral and unceded Coast Salish territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations
ALBUM PROMO VIDEOS
All videos by Alfredo Santa Ana
ABOUT ALFREDO SANTA ANA
Born in Mexico City, and working and living in Vancouver since 2003, Alfredo Santa Ana's music has been praised as "meaningful work, offering substance as well as high style" (Vancouver Sun).
His work in the contemporary Canadian music scene has led to collaborations with a wide-range of artists and groups including the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, dancer & choreographer Margie Gillis, Orchestre de la Francophonie, Veda Hille, Mark Takeshi McGregor, Gabriel Kahane, and most recently, Pulitzer-prize winning composer Caroline Shaw.
His film scores have been presented at the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals, and his past work with director Jamie Travis won him a Best Film Score prize at the NexT International Film Festival Awards in Romania in 2006. As a guitarist, he was featured at the 2017 ISCM World New Music Days performing his own music, and he is also a member of the Vancouver-based avant-prog rock band Square and produces and records Ghost Shepherd with his partner Alisen.
For more information, promotional requests, and EPK please visit alfredosantaana.ca or contact asarecordsvan[at]gmail.com
