In his second monographic album nacen en silencio (“born in silence”), the Oslo-based Mexican composer Luis Fernando Amaya sharpens our sensitivity to the more-than-human lives around us. Comprising pieces for solo instrumentalists and electronics, string quartet, and voices, the album bristles with all the liveliness of its organic inspirations: trees, thunder, fungi, certain airborne beasts. Named for a line by the Uruguayan poet Marosa Di Giorgio—“Mushrooms are born in silence; some of them are; others, with a brief shriek, a slight thunder” (per Amaya’s own translation)—nacen en silencio exemplifies the newest phase of Amaya’s unmistakable musicianship, situating us deeply in worlds that surround us and yet often pass beneath our notice. Here are six works rife with looming, shivering, pullulating sonorities that ring of Amaya’s best, yielding pieces that feel warm to the touch. 

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Amaya’s Dialecto de árbol (“Tree dialects”) series began as a thought exercise: staring at a tree in his former Chicago neighborhood, Amaya asked himself how a tree language might sound. From that one language must then spring many dialects, Amaya thought; he resolved then to compose variations on a single dialect, imagining how its sound might shift under changes in climate or geography. In the series’ sixth variation, for eight singers and 8-channel electronics, the singers produce a thrumming sound by singing through drinking glasses, which they periodically lift from their mouths for abrupt, yawn-like shifts in volume and texture. 

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Next comes un leve trueno (“a slight thunder”), whose title is drawn from the same poem as the first work on this record, and which began as a consideration of paradox: what if thunder, which we perceive as softer when it is farther away, could be both soft and proximal? Written for percussionist Magdalena Rato, un leve trueno involves a bass drum and a timpani placed on opposing sides, each armed with transducers and microphones; what happens on one instrument triggers curious, uncontrollable feedback events on the other. For Amaya, this reaction is inherently fungal: a covert chain of events that emerges without warning, dazzling us. 

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Following is the fourth Dialecto de Árbol variation, for string quartet, which is the sole work in this series to not include voice. Central to the piece, performed by the Chicago-based Varo Quartet, was Amaya’s notion of a tree’s innate “polyphony,” created as its branches move variably in the breeze. The variation induces a sense of gentle suspension, jostled by erratic energies but returning ultimately to repose. 

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For Amaya, composition has long been a means of considering how radically different life forms experience the world. To that end, each work in his Bestiario series is composed with an invisible collaborator: a fantastical animal that Amaya imagines, “consults,” and realizes throughout the process, which results often in unexpected creative pathways. The fifth in this series, written for violist Annegret Meyer-Lindenberg, proposes a character defined by some multiplicity, whether of eyes or wings or feet. (In the interest of letting the listener derive their own creature—perhaps a writhing, airborne figure—the composer will keep his own precise vision to himself.) 

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Closing the album is the titular work, a percussion duo commissioned by the Switzerland-based Mexican percussionist Rubén Bañuelos. Drawing its title and concept from Di Giorgio’s reflection on mushrooms, Amaya sought to develop a work modeled on mycelium, the subterranean fungal communication network through which plants exchange information and nutrients. nacen en silencio likewise lays its foundations subtly, in silvery strikes and woody rumbles that assemble themselves into striking forms. Designed to accommodate players without access to specialty percussion, the work is scored for objects and instruments that are widely available or simple to make.Buried in Amaya’s mind during the writing of this series was a short story by Roald Dahl: “The Sound Machine,” in which a scientist creates a device that allows him to hear plants, and, to his horror, is able to hear their devastated reactions to humanity’s environmental abuses. The story has proved pivotal for many of Amaya’s sonic investigations—but Dialecto in particular. 

- Jennifer Gersten