Julio Lopez folds time and distance in on itself with Cloud Unknowing, their new album and booklet. These songs flow with a gentleness, always creating a soft landing, even as Lopez explores deep crevices and sharp edges in this music. This album is a vulnerable articulation of something buried in muscle and soil, and their quiet burrowing in its center to uncover inner truths. Identities crystallize in the tender voicings and delicate acoustic strums, buoyed by field recordings and emotive strings. The accompanying booklet features song translations and landscape photography that fills in the details of this soundworld. It’s all so moving, both visually and sonically compelling while untangling thick strands of the self. Cloud Unknowing is essential listening.
Cloud Unknowing will be released on August 14 by the excellent Lobby Art. Pre-order HERE. Photos in this article are by Julio Lopez.
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Where does your relationship with sound begin? Are there early memories, specific recordings, moments that first pulled you in?
I don’t remember; it’s really hard to say! My grandparents are music lovers, and they introduced me to so much great music; they would make these mix CDs that I loved. I also remember being pretty blown away by tuning forks.
When did you start playing an instrument, and where did you start? There are several instruments used on Cloud Unknowing, so I’m curious what your path was like…
I started playing violin in elementary school, when I was 8; my parents got me an acoustic guitar a little after that. I was mainly a string player for a while, but have been focusing more and more on singing the last few years.
Your practice sits at a pretty specific intersection of folk traditions, experimental music, and deep historical research. How did those threads find each other in your work? Was there a moment where they started to really come together?
How I access my voices, how I learned to use them, what parts of them I access, in whose company, and with what intention in what I say and sing (and what I don’t) – and then in how another might receive them – all this can feel to me like simultaneously the most authentic and the most conditioned, socially-constructed, over-determined thing ever. And maybe because of that, song feels like a really interesting way to approach the question of authenticity, and honesty, and relationship, and not just between humans, of course, but the wide web of conditions and relations. I think that anyone who is relating to music is receiving and also transforming musical meaning in the moment of that relationship, so that’s the general place I try to orient to.
As for historical research, I think of it as a creative practice – like, I’m not really a scholar or anything, but I love moving around in the libraries and the archives, and learning the stories of songs, and letting stories lead to other stories. I guess it’s that, it’s part of the storytelling dimension of music practice.
The booklet describes this album as emerging from a personal process of working through ideas of lineage, diaspora, appropriation, spirit, and song. Can you talk about what that process actually looked like? Was it primarily research, or something else?
Around the time i started working on these, I was really really lucky to be studying voice and composition with Jessika Kenney, and also Irish “sean nós” singing with Dáithí Sproule, both of whom are incredibly inspiring musicians and such great teachers, and who really (in different ways) opened my sense of what singing is and could be, especially in terms of the relationship between the “traditional” and the “experimental”. I was also (and am still) trying to educate myself about the history of how colonialism, orientalism, and white supremacy have manifested specifically within musical and spiritual practices in this part of the world. There are these processes of erasure, appropriation, misrepresentation, and control that are (at least) as old as whiteness and are deeply embedded in the “folk” and “experimental” traditions in North America. I think it came down to, like, what is it to sing, in this body of mine, in this world? What do I sing, and with what intention? And what other voices are present?
The songs on Cloud Unknowing span a remarkable range of time, geography, and tradition: a 17th-century Irish penal law song, San Juan de la Cruz’s 1577 poem, Judee Sill, Margarita Lecuona, Reverend Gary Davis, your own original composition. What was the thread that held those together for you? Did it feel like one continuous inquiry?
I came across the San Juan poem about 10 years ago now, actually while looking into the history of music theory, and especially the role Islamic scholarship played in the development of music theory in medieval Europe, and ended up getting really interested in Christian and Islamic esoteric literature and theology. I was also really into this overlap between Christian mysticism and critical theory, especially this Derrida book The Gift of Death, which deals with Christianity as a process of “incorporation”, and a collection of essays called Carnal Hermeneutics, dealing with the interpretation of the physical and spiritual bodies. Then a bunch of other life stuff happened, and after and later on, I had the idea to work with the poem as a sung text, thinking about song as prayer, as presence, as a technology for getting out of linear time. I had just started HRT too. I remember thinking, like, what is Christianity in my life? Like, not really what is a Christian or am I one or not, but more like how did it shape me, what are the moments in which it has emerged for me. And what was it saying when it did? As a voice, in the explicit and the secret ways, to just sit with the whole thing of it. And I found it was over and over always intertwined with colonialism but also with resistance and with land, and always being fundamentally and existentially transformed by the traditions and worldviews it was ostensibly trying to absorb or destroy. And always intertwined with music, and philosophy, and love, and the body. And yet not coherent in any consistent way, really. It became kind of this empty question, or it kind of inverted itself into a more open space. The other songs on the record were songs that I already loved and sang, and that kind of helped me answer some of the questions I was sifting around in. to me, they all deal with the relationship between Christian theology, a presencing on the edge of or disguised within Christianity, land, and love/the Beloved.
Your liner notes describe thinking about the piece “en una noche oscura” as both a devotional and a critical queer reading of San Juan’s text. What does that reading of that poem open up for you?
I think the main thing is that, in dealing with all this stuff around history and lineage and tradition, I feel suspicious of nostalgia. Or at least find it really distracting. The poem doesn’t even really mean the same thing to me one day to another, so I’m not trying to put forward an understanding of it really, or to align myself with it in a “belonging” way. If I’m singing it, I’m singing it now, in the wreckage.
The title Cloud Unknowing points to a specific tradition of Christian mysticism, the 14th-century anonymous text about approaching the divine through not-knowing rather than knowledge. How did that concept find its way into this project?
It’s sweet that you caught that! (Do you know that book? [Ed Note: Yes, I do! Though it’s been a long time since I read it]) I showed an early version of the San Juan song to a dear friend who said it sounded like clouds, and I read “The Cloud of Unknowing” right afterward, on a cloudy plane ride. It was a while later that I got this version of the set together, but the title kind of stuck in my head – like the way cloud as a verb is like a veiling, but also a cloud as a thing is this temporary coming-together in the air and land. i don’t practice the specific kind of contemplation that the book lays out but some of the general themes felt resonant, like the advice to lead with love, and to let go of conceptual knowledge. also kind of a joke with myself about how i kept getting obsessed with the kind of bookish thing going on with this project but actually mostly feel like i’m just kind of in the fog and don’t know anything.
The percussion on “si la tierra suspire” includes mesquite pods from a tree by your house. I love that detail – it really stood out to me, and it brings something very grounded and local to it alongside all the vast historical and conceptual territory the album covers. I wonder how you think about that relationship between the immediate and the long-reaching?
I love that that spoke to you! I think maybe I think of it actually the other way around – what the mesquites are doing feels like the long view, and the last 500 years of settler-colonial history the short, and my life just a blip within that. At least in the external sense of linear time. The tree who made the pods is for sure older than me. They are the small kind of pod and have such a beautiful sound. Mesquites also have a whole deep and fascinating history – I want to learn more – but I know they have been in this land for a really long time, and are an important part of indigenous (esp O’odham) food systems. In parts of Southern AZ/Northern MX, some mesquites are considered “invasive” (at least by conservationists) for taking over grasslands that were damaged by settler cattle ranching. And there’s also this whole export economy in the Sonoran borderlands around the North American market for mesquite charcoal for grilling. Human-tree relations…
Harmonic tuning is a recurring preoccupation across the album: 7-limit ratios on the San Juan piece, 5-limit just intonation on the Judee Sill tune. How central is microtonality to how you think about this music? What does it do that equal temperament can’t?
I have been working with different tuning systems for a while, and would say that the question of what is or isn’t ”in tune” is always kind of a thing. With this project, I was thinking both about the way tuning theory and theology/spirituality have been historically intertwined, through things like the Pythagorean “music of the spheres”. And also specifically about the composer and instrument builder Harry Partch and his books Genesis of a Music and Bitter Music. Also, intonation in fiddle music, in ballad singing, blues intonation, the intonations of physical materials – all of these are so deep and have long histories, even if they aren’t theorized in the same way as ET or just intonation (or the theorizations have been marginalized, destroyed, invisibilized, appropriated, or the knowledge within them is resistant to conceptual theorization). I do play these songs in equal temperament sometimes, or, like, play them on an ET-tuned guitar or piano. But even then I think I am trying to orient to the overtones and to the edges of the tuning.
These recordings were made as part of a very personal process. At what point did it become an album? Was there a moment where this became something you wanted to share?
I really just made them for myself, and then shared them with friends. I’m very grateful to Matt Marble (amazing musician and director of the American Museum of Paramusicology) for sharing these recordings with Sam Wenc and Ximena Bedoya of Lobby Art Records, who generously offered to release them on the label.
And, as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Lightning crackle, hawk screech, ocean waves on a long beach, bell of a toaster oven !!
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.
