Mexican sound artist Juanjosé Rivas presents an album where the lines between language and musicality are involuntarily blurred, thanks to interventions reminiscent of those used in musique concrète.

Almost at the end of last year, right at the peak of the pandemic, sound artist Juanjosé Rivas released material under an interesting concept: flexidiscs in the form of postcards, in which the sights that can be appreciated from his apartment in Mexico City, were translated into pure sound (through the use of field recordings and electronics). Now, in this most recent production, Rivas, with a certain irony, subjects the audio documentary Folkways History of Broadcasting: Language as Arts to a tortuous process in which he turns the documentary’s main topic (language, of course) on its head through very entertaining sound alteration. Naturally, the only title apt enough for such an endeavor is a very primitive onomatopeia: GROAR.

Accompanied by aural manifestations, and being manipulated in different ways and different techniques (slapback delay, changes in tone and speed, looped repetitions) language gradually loses its communicative qualities and reverts into a primal state. We can hear clear statements, with concrete messages (“Squaw dance”), until Rivas decides to intervene, and the result can be reminiscent, in part, to what we can hear in musique concrète (although without that vintage quality that this genre always seems to retain), or the cumulative practices of an artist like Pierre-André Arcand.

Despite the variety of sounds, textures, and the superposition of one voice on top of the other, as well as the inclusion of samples of elements other than the voice (derived from the audio documentary), Rivas's pieces don’t feel like typical sound collages because there is a very distinct division between sound and words. There is cadence, rhythm, and involuntary melodies that stem from the use of repetition, but this is not music; in fact, musical language is another element that Rivas is aiming to criticize. Inevitably, though, our brains will attempt to integrate it as such to try and give direction to this chaos.

No matter how volatile it can be, there is a clear formula that manifests throughout GROAR: language takes the same direction as the sounds that surround it, blurring the differences between phonetics and musicality: words become nothing more than random sounds. "Truth beauty" works as a remarkable example because, as that, insistent, piercing sound turns on itself, becoming more chaotic, the words seem to want to follow and give in to this maelstrom too, completely destroying their meaning by incurring in frenzied changes in speed and pitch.

“Shutting a tomcat’s tail in a rusty escalator” has a rather funny moment in which we can hear the phrase “… language is a function of…” only to become deformed, leaving us waiting for an answer. In the original audio documentary, the complete sentence says that the language is a function of occasion, and the chapter ends by stating that the language is a reflection of each culture. By exploiting the malleability of language, Rivas ends up reaffirming this thesis, reflecting the fragility of those systems we have invented to make our existence seem easier, but that, every now and then, end up becoming mere obstacles or shackles. Sometimes a message is more effective when the method employed transcends conventionality, when the only thing left to say is GROAR!