Nnux, the solo project of Mexico City–based composer, producer and keyboard player Ana López-Reyes, is based on the digital processing of samples from voices, acoustic instruments, everyday sounds, electronic beats and synthesizers.
Along with The Rhythm Method, the string quartet hailed by The New Yorker as “trailblazing…skillful composer-performers,” López-Reyes will premiere Ausencias, a piece written for string quartet and electronics that explores the relationship between the dead and the living in Mexican culture. Each of the piece’s eight sections tells the story of a different ghost that walks among the living; ghosts with real deaths and ghosts with symbolic deaths (absent fathers, missing children) exist in the earthly world through memory. “In Mexico, not only the dead are missing; because of machismo, there are absent fathers and children that spend their whole lives living with their ghost,” writes the artist. “There are mothers with missing children (who could be dead or not), these women dig the ground with their own hands with the hope of finding their children one day. There are ghosts walking among us, the girls and women who are victims of femicide, the ones who die in other violent ways, or the ones who simply transcended from different causes and whose presence we miss in this world. Each one of the sections of the piece is based in personal stories of my family or stories from events happening in Mexico.”
