enough of music

Today we are going to move away from the usual vein of the column —that of nostalgic melodrama— to talk about enough of music, the most recent phonographic production by the oriental one-man band Martín Buscaglia, released in March last year by the independent Spanish label Lovemonk. This was the album I listened to the most in 2020, which was, in turn, the year I listened to the most music. He broke my pot from the first day, and he has continued to break it systematically, until he earned the broken record label.

Without prior information, counting only on what the registry provides from the cover, it seems, after the first minute of The instruments, the initial theme, that here we are going to find an experimental and avant-garde movement, so radical, that in the booklet, instead of the lyrics of the songs, there will be an aesthetic manifesto where Martín exposes the theoretical bases of his proposal , with a photo of Arnold Schönberg at the bottom right of each sheet.

There are four reasons to believe this. One is the Uruguayan artist himself, a guy who has been unable to remain in a state of rest since he started moving in the mid-90s, and he tells us so (more or less) in To beat, the second track: “Why do you want to do / what you already did yesterday, / if you already know that”. Another, the cover image, the work Witches going to the coven (Luis Ricardo Falero, 1878), where we observe a band of naked, unleashed, glorious, fearsome sorceresses, flying towards the place where they will carry out very progressive or very entertaining acts for the conventional nineteenth-century eye, which is why, in order to be able to close quietly, he gave them stupid names like “satan worship”. The imagination will never assign to that scene a patterned or ordered sound; the audio track that travels from the retina to the brain —and that does not really reach the ear because it is a symbolic track— will always be heard anarchic, insane, unbridled like the demonstrations of the beautiful feminist witches of Mexico City. The third reason is obviously that provocative title: enough of music. Half of the album has already been sold from there. And the last one, the opening, because it is an off-center piece, chaotic in appearance. At this point, less curious listeners might decide not to waste their afternoon musical chance with breaks, stop playback and move to safer ground (what do I know, Thalía, let's say); then they would be missing out on a tremendously simple album, without dark moves or formal 23rd century scores, an album that is, as Martín says in a previous phonogram, “at the antipodes of noxious noise”.

Let's stay with the example of that first cut, The instruments, the theme that comes out the most on the plate, the most misleading, the one that we most connect with the title of the plate. In this song Buscaglia constantly plays with the limits of chaos and order, but this chaos, we know, is an artifice; it looks like chaos, when it is actually order out of focus. In music, chaos never really exists, any approach to it will have a discursive character, of a “means for”. It is not the artistic form that best gets along with him, that is why the legions of haters of Yoko Ono it is so hard for them to assign value to their work only from the musical plane. Music is much more boring, much more predictable, much more reactionary than we, the listening crowd, would like. progressive.

As chaos and music are opposing elements, every time they appear together an oxymoron will be created. Coincidentally, the River Plate artist has mentioned this word on several occasions, when answering questions from the media about the title of the album. Let's pay attention and see enough of music like a phonographic oxymoron where the opposite expressions are, on the one hand, the name; on the other, the clarity, the naturalness of the eleven songs that make it up; and the new meaning that is generated from the combination of both would be, then, long live friendly music, enough noise, and so on as far as we want to go.

Martín Buscaglia must be one of those people who don't handle awkward silence well, and tell you their life without you asking. You meet them at the bus stop once every two years, and they begin to talk to you about their work and their boss as if it were a public and notorious fact, as if you remembered something of what they told you the last time. After saying goodbye they keep thinking about that, why the hell they had to give so many details about their life to a guy they see once every two years, but it's too late. Silence creeps them out and, furthermore, they are so shy that they don't dare to ask about your things, because they think it will be an indiscretion, so they talk about themselves to fill the gap, in a gesture that looks a bit like sacrifice. To overcome his shyness, what Martín does is generate a large volume of sound information, but (and this is the most important thing) it never saturates the composition. Everything, absolutely everything that Buscaglia says is heard, no voice is diluted in the chorus. Martin joins, does not overlap; prefers horizontal urbanizations, cities without skyscrapers, that is why it is very difficult to find an empty plot in the cadastre of enough of music. Take, for example, the minute 1:12 of Chuza, where even the natural act of taking a breath to continue singing has a rhythmic function, they have turned it into an instrument and made it occupy a space in the theme.

The international hit of the album is, at first hearing, I fell in love, a subject that is impossible to ignore, because it is rich and delicate. It has a main reason that is going to stay stuck in the back of our necks for a week. A riff half posh, because neither the lack of movement nor the excess of it suits him. The bass sounds and the body, obviously, is going to ask you to get up and dance, but not dance as if you were in a club in Ibiza in pre-COVID times (or in one in Cancun in times of COVID); dance alone, with the legs slightly bent, the arms not too far from the trunk and the waist dosing the kinetic energy; dance backwards, from the outside in, from the world to the physical; dance short, and thus, give total meaning to that hook of the song that says: "What pleasure and what laziness!".

The other track chosen so far to lead the disc in the parade of streaming is To beat, which is very good, but I think that the penultimate, Easywould have worked better. Perhaps Martin is saving it for later, when people have piled so much new music on top of the album that they're already starting to forget about it, thus bringing it back to the top of the pile. There is still time, but it would be a pity if that song is not promoted as single, and have to spend eternity in the pavilion of the forgotten, unless someone at Netflix rescues her to be part of the soundtrack of one of those stupid things that Netflix does. Easy, in addition to being in tune very well with the concept of enough of music, has more wood than hit; in this case, of those hits late-turner preferred by people who drive alone on long highways. It has, for me, the best first two verses of the record: “I could return my love to you, / what happens is that I no longer have it”, a solution that is too fine, too accessible to everyone and used by no one, of a simplicity too closed to believe that Buscaglia did not copy it, consciously or not (and I always say this as someone who claims recycling, watch out, don't eat me).

The artist declares at the beginning of the album, like someone who is opening a profile on a social network, that he likes instruments. We could add, without his permission, with which he gives us the whole of his work, that he also likes words very much. Sure, all songwriters like words, but not everyone likes them, too, without their meaning, that is, only because of their sonorous, rhythmic properties. Martin's words belong less to language than to music. They say, but before they sound. In two ducks, for example, the Montevidean begins by narrating a story —a delusion, rather, but with characters, setting and action—, however, along the way he entertains himself, like children, or adults with attention deficit, he forgets what he was telling and starts playing with random noun phrases: “Heat wave. / Virgin green wine”, but he also gets bored quickly and, after saying “coarse horoscope”, he remains cavorting in the consonant rhyme, and continues: “Landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch / through a jar. / Intellect fiasco”.

I recently read a review or an interview where someone described Martín Buscaglia as a post-author. I like that for him post-author: tightrope walker of the most beautiful songs that say nothing.