Sonámbulos

The new sleepwalkers are us.
Martín Caamaño: guitars, keyboards, programming and sampler.
Manuel Caizza: percussion, programming and sampler.
Recorded by Luciano Pedreiro at Spector Studio.
Mixing, mastering and postproduction by Ezequiel Kronenberg at Estudio El Mar.
Artistic collaboration: Ulises Conti.
Cover photo: Pilar Condomí.
Executive production: Melisa Aller.
Published by Metamusica.

Sonámbulos is Martín Caamaño's first solo album. The album evokes that territory suspended between sleep and wakefulness where words lose weight and consciousness disintegrates. The songs seem to be absent songs that each listener can complete while listening. Without defined leads to guide us, the melodies of these somnambulist songs are elusive and ghostly. They barely suggest themselves in the harmonic and rhythmic framework, while timbral elements that do not usually coexist, such as the acoustic guitar together with the sounds of ambient or electronic music, come together.

Just like the cover photo (a fake moon that is nothing more than the reflection of a mirror hanging in a steamy bathroom) the guitars sound like a piano or a rhythm machine, and an accessory like a whistle tuner becomes an unexpected instrument capable of emulating the sustained note of a harmonium or a synthesizer. In the sound space of the album the wood of the guitar amalgamates with the plastic beats created on a cell phone, and the subtle closeness of a blowing sound or the sliding of the fingers on the strings connect with the signals emitted by the samples of distant records. The album is built from these opposites that merge recreating the ambivalence of the sleepwalker who is asleep and awake at the same time (or maybe neither).

In 1930, the Austrian writer Herman Broch used the figure of the sleepwalker to describe a man suspended between two times, unable to fully “wake up” for the turn of the century. Through music, this album tries to imagine that same man but in the present day, walking half awake, half asleep between the ruins of a world on the verge of extinction and the emerging structures of the world to come.