touch•me•not by hara alonso
Hara Alonso is back with her new material releasing today by the Fuulab label ( or shall we say, a platform as it encompasses many descriptions.
Six tracks that elude an easy description as in terms of genre we are dealing here with many trajectories and modifications, modulations.
An assembly of electronics, field recordings, empowered and helped by by the percussions of Ryan Packard, the double bass of Ville Bromander and Ellen Söderhult’s voice, Hara is able to create a gentle and poetic rooms for her meandering travels and trips filled with melancholy, essence of some truly poetic verse and what dwells between the lines of those.
It’s a journey of senses – delicate and fragile, yet moving forward gently and swiftly at the same time with a soft narrative of sensuous recollections. The beauty of those pieces lies in the fact that they stand and sit on the shoulders of a pretty firm and solid scaffolding of how Hara moves with the compositional process and never takes anything for granted, building her own language through that.
My first and immediate thought was that there is so much in common with the compositions of late Sawako and the feel of how the electronic moods were created in This Mortal Coil, but Hara Alonso is much more than that. A mature artist who has built her own modality and idioms – you can’t mistake those for anything else.
A beautiful, poetic journey through discovery, thoughts, recollections and everything else that eludes the hassles of life.
touch•me•not emerges as a reflection on the corporeal relationship between the skin and the surrounds-
a surface,
the ocean,
a dried flower
Hara Alonso's new album delves deep into our approach to sensoriality as bodies and sentient beings, by refusing to operate a discrimination of species. In that sense, it invites us to forget the tyranny of the visual, the lineal and the logic and pay attention to the haptic, evoked through a touching sound. It raises the question about the place we inhabit in a world that is weeping to be reenchanted and touched.
In the 18th century, Emanuel Swedenborg introduces the idea of correspondence and takes seriously the senses and the events of the sensual world as a proof of the spiritual world.
A century later, Baudelaire, inspired by the Swedish theologian, writes the poem Correspondances, in which the senses are confused, immersed in a synesthetic hallucination. Hara Alonso takes us on a walk not far away from the path Baudelaire strolled, through meadows, symbols, light and perfumes, entering a dimension of inverted senses where the body spills into a circle of desiring sensations and sensational desires, enclosing an innocent memory surrendered to the whole.
Accompanied by the percussions of Ryan Packard, the double bass of Ville Bromander and Ellen Söderhult’s voice, Hara Alonso weaves a loom composed of halos of harmonies, field recordings, Juno 6 and prepared piano.
Special thanks to Başak Günak for all the care and vision during this process.
Thanks to my friend Francesco Torelli, Alexandra Nilsson, Sofie Vitelli ad Gulbeden Kulbay for listening to the drafts.
credits
released March 26, 2025
Recorded in Gotland, Stockholm and San Esteban de Nogales.
Mixed by Tobias Karlehag.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Lacquer cut by Andreas Lupo.
Art by Leticia Bernaus.
Design by Helga Juárez.
Text by Alba Pagán.
license
all rights reserved
https://fuulab.bandcamp.com/album/touch-me-not
FUU is a platform which humbly feeds itself with instant associations between sound and image.
FUU is is conceived to flourish on the encounters between sonic and visual arts, and the co-operation of the artists from differing disciplines.
Biography
Hara Alonso is a pianist, composer and sound artist. Her compositional process is based on bodily experience, exploring multisensory practices, memory, space and imagination as tools for sound making. In recent years she has expanded the sonic and interpretive possibilities of the piano through extended techniques, somatic practices and signal processing. Her sonic universe, described as 'gloomy bubbling electronic power ambient', navigates between granular landscapes, minimal rhythms and hypnotic layers with a strong micro-lyrical presence.
Hara’s music has been showcased in the form of ensemble, solo, sound installation in festivals such as MUTEK (CDMX, Mexico), Sound of Stockholm (Stockholm), She Makes Noise (Madrid), STRP (Eindhoven), Berlin Arts Week (Berlin), Keroxen (Tenerife), KJØTT (Bergen), Festival D’A (Barcelona, Spain) or Malmöfestivalen (Malmö, Sweden) among others.
In 2018 her first EP, ‘Pianoïse’ for piano and electronics, was released by the label Keroxen. In 2021, Eotrax released her acclaimed first solo album ‘Somatic Suspension’. Free jazz album ‘Ritual para acercarse’ came out in 2022 in collaboration with Susana Santos Silva (trumpet), Elsa Bergman (double bass) and Camila Nebbia (sax) by Ramble Records. In 2023 her solo piano album, ‘Notions of hope’, released in piano and coffee records, came out with 10 meditative piano tracks. ’Towards a melancholy of the future’ came out in 2024 together with the Mexican artist Concepción Huerta in the label Superpang. Her latest album ‘touch-me-not’ came out last spring on the Berlin based label FUU.
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