𝘖𝘯 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩,
𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦
𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦
𝘢𝘯𝘥
𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘴
𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘱𝘴𝘦,
𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴.


For its eighth release, Moneda presents ‘On a long enough line’ by Emiddio Vasquez. In the first release under his name, the album reflects upon a period dedicated solely to live performances and sparse documentation.

Interludes and layering aside, the album's core was recorded in one take in Berlin, in 2017, in preparation for such live performance. Apart from its practical purpose, this recording also retrospectively documents Vasquez’s semi-conscious distancing from his primary instrument, the guitar, only to find himself back with its abstraction: a piezo microphone with soldered metallic strings, a string driver and a modular feedback system fed into a physical model of a string. All these analytical decisions and series of transformations were anything but impervious to the mid-10’s explosion in the modular synthesis industry, its reminders to “not forget to press record” and the viral ambient aesthetics of “Rings into Clouds”.

From another view, however, this album also introduces sonically Vasquez’s ongoing preoccupation with the discourse surrounding continuous and discrete domains and the leakages between analog and digital processes; a question that lingers unanswered throughout his work and research and is constantly rephrased and reposed. In this album, that question follows the image of a spandrel.

As an architectural element that describes the almost triangular area between an arch and its column, a spandrel can also be imagined as the indeterminate area between a continuous signal and its quantization that demarcates what is supposedly “lost”. Having fixated for years over that space, and what is lost, but also the relationship between a live performance and a release, lived experience and its archive, for Vasquez the figure of the spandrel also suggests a possible solution from its use in evolutionary biology: what is lost is often the byproduct, or the parergo, of an overarching process, lacking an evident plan or even direct benefits for it, but nonetheless comprising a necessary part of its structure. On a long enough line, transformations render what is lost (or created) as both essential and negligible.

The artwork, also produced by Emiddio Vasquez, follows a similar train of thought: a terrazzo piece, with clipped and defaced currencies embedded, a common problem in early modern coinage, and a portrait of a long-lost memory, re-scanned, photographed and re-rendered on a virtual surface. All of which further stress the space between experience and recollection, physical matter and its representation.

With these notes in mind, the songs freely traverse between these two worlds, recuperating resonances lost but also releasing what has been cherished and hoarded to a point of danger of extinction and exhaustion, all the while gathering digital dust.