Lorena Alvarez and Alejandro Palacios create shapeshifting, immersive soundworlds. Intricate melodies are harnessed and pulled apart, creating trance-like moments where time slows and details bloom. Their latest, Jardín Giratorio, has a muted sheen, colored with tape hiss and soft resonances. It is very lived in. Shades of whimsy emerge naturally as though Alvarez and Palacios have tapped into an ethereal current flowing between sounds, rendering Jardín Giratorio as a landscape that is quiet, tender, but never ends.
Jardín Giratorio is OUT NOW on Not Not Fun.
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What are your earliest memories of sound and music? Were there particular moments or recordings that first made you aware of listening as something you were actively doing?
Alejandro: One of my earliest memories is discovering a cassette recorder at my mom’s house that let me record my own voice or whatever was playing on the radio. I recorded Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and listened to it thousands of times, changing the speed and pitch over and over. That really blew my mind. I also just loved the song. I must have been around eight years old.
Lorena: My father used to listen to The Magic Flute by Mozart very loudly at home. I must have been 5 years old, and I sang the soprano part standing on top of a plastic clock toy I had that served as a mini platform. I remember being very concentrated on reaching the high tones of the melody.
Lorena, your background spans minimalist dance music and DJ work. Alejandro, yours runs through psychedelic lounge and dub through Nonlocal Research, etc. Those feel like pretty different starting points (though with some overlap, of course!) What were each of you listening to and making in the years before you found each other?
Lorena: My background includes dance music and DJing, but my deepest musical training is in classical and jazz performance. Because of that, I tend to approach music simply as music, regardless of genre or function. When we began collaborating, it was during the pandemic, which makes that period feel a bit blurred in my memory. What I do remember is that the invitation to work with Alejandro felt like a breath of fresh air. It also felt like a return to something very essential for me: improvisation. Working together gave me the opportunity to reconnect with one of the things I enjoy most and one of the practices that shaped me most deeply as a musician.
Alejandro: Before we started playing together, we’d all been stuck in lockdown because of COVID. I kept making music during that period. I made Equis I Griega Zeta, the second album in the trilogy I’m still finishing with Nonlocal Research, and I also made an album for the Argentine-Chilean label Emociones called Los Gatos No Fuman (Cats Don’t Smoke).
How did the two of you first connect, and when did it become clear there was something worth pursuing together?
Lorena: We had known each other before, and every encounter had been pleasant and fun. But during the residency and the concert that followed, I think we realized that we work well together. It never feels heavy or tedious. For me, that is crucial.
Alejandro: If I remember correctly, we first met in late 2018 in Valdivia. We were both playing at a festival called Fluvial. Lore was there with Barbara Blade, and I was playing with Protistas, so we crossed paths a couple of times. Later, I realized I was living with a Uruguayan friend, Ino Guridi, who happened to be friends with everyone in Barbara Blade. I remember you all came over to my place a few times to hang out, and it was always good fun. After that, we didn’t see each other again until we were invited to take part in the Nieve & Smog residency. I accepted, though not without a bit of anxiety. I had this idea that Lore was an incredibly accomplished musician—and she is. She seemed to be operating on another level, and I found that intimidating. But as soon as we started improvising, everything fell into place almost instantly.
So your first record, Paisajes Para Torcer al Reloj, came out of a residency in Santiago in 2022. Looking back at it now, what does that record feel like to you? A starting point, a document, a specific moment, or maybe something else?
Alejandro: For me, that’s where it all began. I have a special affection for that record, the way you do for anything that’s foundational, because we made it without any expectations whatsoever. The residency lasted a month, and I think we got together maybe eight times before the final concert. The show turned out beautifully. It sold out, and something really special happened. That’s unusual for this kind of music, which can often be a little static in a live setting. This was the opposite. I remember the audience leaving energized, happy, genuinely moved. The next day, we met again to record the album. We were exhausted, but somehow it worked all over again. Everything came together remarkably fast.
Lorena: For me, it feels like something that is always evolving. When you record something improvised, every time you listen back to it, you are reliving the experience in a radically different way from when it first happened. For me, it is very strange to revisit something that I have only experienced once before, at the moment it was recorded. My perception of it is constantly changing and is shaped in part by the way other people perceive it, as well as by the memories that resurface from the recording day: the mood I was in, the things that happened. Sometimes I just listen to the music; other times, the listening experience is deeply intertwined with what happened on the day of the recording.
What changed between Paisajes and Jardín Giratorio? Was there a sense of picking up a thread, or did the new album feel like it needed to find its own footing?
Alejandro: The main idea was simply to record under better technical conditions than we had for Paisajes para torcer al reloj. We wanted it to sound a little less lo-fi. I remember we talked about adding overdubs and giving ourselves more freedom in post-production, but in the end we didn’t do any of that. Every track is basically the first take. We booked three days in the studio and recorded with Antonia Valladares in the same studio where we made the first album. So I’m not actually sure how big the leap was from one record to the next.
Lorena: I think we wanted to explore different instrumentations, and we also wanted to document how our improvisation has evolved over the years of playing together. In that sense, I think it’s both. It follows a thread from the first album, but it also finds its own footing.
The title Jardín Giratorio is beautiful. A turning garden, something rotating or revolving. Where did that image come from, and how does it relate to what the music is doing?
Lorena: It was Alejandro’s idea. I loved it. The image is beautiful, but in Spanish it is also a very rich combination of sounds and syllables.
Alejandro: Images like Jardín Giratorio, or song titles in general, usually just arrive out of nowhere. Often right before I fall asleep, or in moments like that. But I do put myself in the right state of mind, almost expecting them to appear. That usually coincides with the mixing stage, so the two processes become deeply intertwined. Sounds and mental or poetic images start bleeding into one another.
Outside of music, what are the ideas, images, or obsessions that keep pulling at you? Are there things from outside sound that find their way into this work? And connected to that, how do your interests and instincts overlap, and where do they diverge? Is the tension between those divergences part of what makes the collaboration so rich?
Alejandro: For me, everything gets mixed together. Whatever I’m reading at the time, what I’ve been listening to, films I’ve been watching, my mood, the level of political frustration I’m carrying around—which, in this country, is no small thing—all of it ends up feeding into the music.
Lorena: This year I started practicing kung fu. I learned that the term refers to something close to “skill acquired through effort, time, and discipline.” In that sense, anything can have its own kung fu. It has refreshed my interest in instrumental practice, since it is built on many of the same principles. Beyond that, I tend to avoid thinking too much about what we have in common and what we don’t. I feel it kills the magic.
Improvisation is central to this project, but the music never feels accidental. There’s real architecture to it. How do you think about structure when working this freely?
Lorena: On my end, I just listen. When you are listening, the music itself tells you what you have to do.
Alejandro: We usually prepare ourselves mentally before going into the studio, and we’ll have some ideas about instrumentation or share a few references with each other beforehand. But there’s never a fixed concept. Besides, after three days of recording, we always end up with far more material than what finally makes it onto the album.
This music, or maybe even more precisely – these sound worlds – you all create have this feeling of warmth and tactility that seems very deliberate. Words and thoughts that come to mind are like wood and dust and light (rather than anything cold or digital). So I wonder, how do you think about the physical and material qualities of the music you make together?
Lorena: For me, it feels like playing a game where you have to build something, like making sand castles. In the beginning, you only have sand, but once you start bringing out ideas and you see that the other person is building things too, you begin to notice that something is taking shape. There are some houses over there, some gardens, a bridge, and you start working in relation to that. You build in interaction with what is already there.
Alejandro: I honestly have no idea. I suppose it has something to do with the range of the instruments we use and the chemistry that appears once we start improvising together. Beyond that, I couldn’t really say.
Santiago feels like a real presence in this music, even if it’s never stated outright. How does where you live and work filter into what you make?
Lorena: Precarity. If you want to do something here, you have to build it almost from zero, with a lot of help from your friends. That percolates into the music.
Alejandro: To be honest, I don’t really hear anything specifically “Santiaguino” in our music. For me, the only truly beautiful thing about this city is the Andes. On those rare days after rain, when the air is finally clean and the snow-covered mountains rise above you, so impossibly sharp and white, it’s a genuinely sublime—almost sacred—experience. But that happens maybe twice a year. Right now, in July, I think Santiago is one of the bleakest places I’ve ever seen. Everything feels oppressively gray. Even the mountains look ominous through the smog.
One of the things I am drawn to with this work is how much breathing room there is in the music. Silence feels like this active ingredient, or something like that! How important is space and silence to you in this music? Do you think about what’s not there as much as what is?
Alejandro: That’s a big question—the role of silence in music. Let me think…
Lorena: I don’t think about silence consciously. I rather think that if you are not going to say something that makes a contribution, you’d better say nothing.
Are there sounds or directions you haven’t explored yet that pull at you?
Lorena: Yes. I’m about to start a Master’s degree in Music Technology in Mexico, and my project is to build a pedal with sensors that controls multiple sound effects simultaneously in multi-parameter ways for musical improvisation. I’m looking forward to bringing the results into this project.
Alejandro: I’d actually like to make something that’s a bit more unruly—less quiet, less subtle, less delicate. We worked on one piece that was heading in that direction, but in the end, we decided to leave it off this record.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Alejandro: The snap of a fishing line slicing through the current when a fish suddenly pulls hard against the hook.
Lorena: The sound of subway rails humming beneath passing trains.
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.
