Morita Vargas makes music from the deepest reaches of imagination, and her latest, III, is proof: all dark matter, pure dark magic, with an internal logic so complete it feels less like an entire world with its own atmosphere and gravity. Buoyant rhythms ride midnight waves while childlike choirs surface and dissolve, and through it all, Vargas’s voice is at the center. It gets broken into strata, melted, reformed, and repitched, before being fused back together in angular structures and unfamiliar sonic silhouettes. She casts revelations wrapped in black threads and tonal silk. Even inside this ticking timebomb is a hidden tenderness ready to bludgeon unsuspecting listeners. Vargas builds the machinery as a distraction before her voice cracks everything wide open. Recorded in Buenos Aires across eleven years, III crafts an environment of tactile intimacy that never quite prepares the listener for what’s coming next.
III is OUT NOW on Hidden Harmony.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
What are your earliest memories of sound? Was there a specific moment or experience that made you realize sound was going to be central to your life?
I listened to the radio a lot when I was little and would wait for my favorite songs to be recorded on cassette. The announcer’s voice would always interrupt the beginning and end of the songs, and it made me angry. Especially because I would then use those songs to invent choreographies in my room, and the announcer’s voice would interrupt my performance. I was 10 years old, but I truly believed I was a professional dancer and took my work very seriously, hahah. So I think the music first entered my body.
Later, as the years went by, I became more of a music lover, and I noticed that the parts I liked most in songs were the least “captivating” ones; it was the small details that appeared in a song that moved me. So I wondered, how did this artist come up with this idea? Why did they make this decision to put this sound here? For me, music is a collage, so I always get excited when something is poorly arranged, or placed where it doesn’t seem to belong, but that’s where it has to be; It’s like hiding a sound behind a curtain, but letting it peek out a little without being too obvious. I like those deformed constructions; I think that’s what made me want to start composing my own things.
How did you first start making music? Was there an instrument, a piece of software, a friend’s studio, or something else that opened the door?
For eight years, I had a very boring job in Argentina. I was a receptionist at a software company. I was so bored that I listened to music all day on some very cheap speakers that came with my computer. The sound was awful, but at least my mind wandered to the songs. One day, I started singing along to a song, recording myself with my phone’s voice memo, then another song, and so on. One day, I got home, listened to everything, and said, “I have to do something with all this singing.” I wasn’t very interested in the background song, which served as a backing track, but rather in the melody I had created on top of it. A friend showed me how to use Ableton Live, and that was the gateway. I didn’t have a microphone, so I recorded everything with my phone’s microphone. I didn’t have many instruments, just a guitar with a few strings that I didn’t know how to tune, a kalimba, and a harmonica. However, that was enough; you don’t need much to make the music.
Has your relationship to the voice as an instrument changed over time? Was singing always part of how you worked, or did it come in later?
My sister Sofia was the singer in the family; she had a spectacular voice. Unfortunately, she died in 2014, and there was a profound silence in my family. Personally and deeply, I filled it with these songs, which flowed from me constantly, and I feel they were my catharsis, a way to ease the pain. However, there’s a lot of melancholy in the way I sing. I always feel like I’m singing to her, as if she were going to hear me, or perhaps waiting for a response. She kept insisting that I had to sing, but I was always too embarrassed; I always felt bad at it. So, for me, singing was a challenge and a very intense step, because every time I sing, I’m connected to her, more than to myself.
How has living and working in Buenos Aires shaped your practice over time? Not just culturally, but sonically, architecturally, atmospherically?
What is great about Buenos Aires is that we’re always networking. Among friends and colleagues. The entire cultural scene is always trying to help each other out because we live in a country where there’s no money for this kind of thing, or we’re paid badly. Argentina has a huge amount of musical talent related to experimental music, ambient, and noise. The city is noisy; the pace of life here makes you move fast, but you always have to find refuge. In friends and in our rooms. I always compose and record inside my room, in silence, and with no one around. My practice is completely private, with all my mistakes and successes. I’m not much of a nerd, so I’m not that much of a perfectionist either.
III was recorded over eleven years, from 2014 to 2025. How do you think about a project that lives with you that long? Were there moments where the album became something different than what you originally imagined it to be?
The album was a slow process, taking shape through different personal phases. I went through a period of deep connection with the guitar, and during that time, I composed a lot of folk-style music. I also entered a more electronic and danceable phase, where I wanted to get people moving and have my songs make them dance. And I also went through a more “Latin” phase, where I was a bit at odds with atmospheric ambient because it made me sleepy, and I needed to shake my soul with driving rhythms that would get my blood pumping. It was all a long process, and at one point I thought, “I’m not going to be able to fit all of this into one album; it doesn’t all fit together.” But well, here it is, all that diversity together and united in one place, which I’m truly proud of.
The vocal work on the album sits in an interesting territory, like somewhere between post-opera and autotune, glossolalia and melody. How do you approach the voice as a compositional element? Is it treated differently than the electronics?
I try to sing with different voices, as if I were many different characters. I’m constantly slipping into a random character who has something to say, sometimes in a language that doesn’t exist, other times in my own. I like to play at being an opera singer one day, possessed by Nina Hagen the next, dissolving into the ether the next, and just my raw, unaffected voice the next.
I really enjoy working with layers; I create many vocal layers with these characters. I usually start by inventing a melody, then build things on top of it, and finally, I erase that initial melody. It’s a fantastic experiment.
Bass feels structural here, almost architectural. What draws you to low frequencies as a foundation, and how do you think about the relationship between what anchors a track and what drifts above it?
Wow, that’s a great question, and thanks for noticing 🙂 I’m drawn to contrast.
I compose a lot with images. First, I imagine the image, then I give that image a sound. For example, I imagine a soft velvet fabric on the floor, and on top of it, coiled up, a barbed wire. That’s my starting point, that contrast between two objects that have nothing to do with each other, but that can coexist and generate something. Elegance, danger, a caress, a wound. What anchors and what floats, the perfect symbiosis where both things coexist individually and together in the same sound/visual ecosystem.
Speaking of the bass, “tactile” is a word that comes to my mind with this music. How much do you think about the body when you’re composing? Is there a physical dimension to how you hear what you’re making?
There’s a surefire way for me to tell when a song moves me (whether it gives me goosebumps or makes me cry), it means that what I want to happen is happening. There’s a lot of feeling in my tracks, or at least that’s what I try to convey—that the listener feels an emotion. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable because you don’t feel like feeling anything, but the truth is, I always try to make the music I would have liked to hear. And the body reacts to that; it tells me when a song is wonderful and when it’s just as if it didn’t exist.
You’ve been working with Hidden Harmony Recordings since their earliest days. How has that relationship evolved, and what does it mean to make a record within a long-term collaboration like that?
I still can’t believe the day Valentin wrote to me about releasing my first album on vinyl. He was in Estonia, and I was in Argentina, right in the middle of a pandemic. Something both unthinkable and a dream come true. To this day, I feel profound happiness with the journey “8” has taken around the world. The reception it’s had and the exposure thanks to this label, which has exquisite curation—that’s truly a fine piece of work. I think I made the label wait several years, and I was afraid of losing their patience or being too late. But we were able to build a very close relationship where I was in constant communication about my creative process, and the fact that the label believed in me again is truly powerful and expansive.
The record feels really intimate despite its spatial scope. How do you hold those two qualities together without one overwhelming the other?
It’s the story of my life, the yin and yang. It’s a bit of a cliché to talk about light and darkness, but on the album, I try to reflect, with raw honesty, various private and intimate moods. I think the secret lies in the balance, that the profound intensity doesn’t consume everything and send us into the abyss, and that the ethereal, dreamlike, and volatile elements don’t make us get lost in the infinite. There’s something alchemical about putting songs together; you’re combining elements like a mad scientist in his laboratory, until something explodes, and then you say, “Oops, I got a little too dramatic.” I wanted to tell many stories; I really feel that on this album, I opened up and took certain risks and explored paths I hadn’t traveled before. Like the decisions we all make in life when opportunities or problems arise, and once we’ve gone through them, how we talk about them and what we share. The music is the same; it’s the right balance between what you want to say and what you want to keep secret, leaving the listener to discover it for themselves.
And as always, to close…. What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The boiling water in the kettle I use for “mate” which is the typical and traditional herbal infusion that we drink in Argentina, the sound of the mate straw when you finish drinking it, the cicadas in the trees, the sound of the airplane turbine taking off, the open mouth of a person eating Pop Rocks candy, kittens purring, the noise my hair makes when I brush it, a baby snoring, the rain when there is thunder and lightning, the song of the great kiskadee bird, and a contagious laugh.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
