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La Buffadora
2-Channel Computer Music composition [21:58]
Background
Taking a spring break to escape from "Masters Thesis Madness" in Valencia (California Institute of the Arts), Serafine Klarwein and myself spontaneously drove 230 miles south into Baja Califonia, south of the border where we knew there was an Aquatic Geyser which would inspire, if not merely distract us for a fleeting moment.
---- that's about all life is really, a finite series of fleeting moments ---- thanks for sharing this one with me, Serafine!
Having studied a map for about 15 minutes, we loaded into Serafine's red YOYO pickup and figured if we stuck to the coast the whole way down, we couldn't miss it!
If memory serves me right, we listened to Daniel Johnston's latest release pretty much on repeat: FUN on chikipedia
FUN on Spotify
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The Second Largest marine geyser on Earth, La Bufadora is a blowhole and tourist attracion located on the Punta Banda Peninsula in Baja California, Mexico, about 17 miles south of Ensenada. |
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| image shamelessly stolen from some random place on the interwebs, owner unknown. |
About the Composition
Whilst auditioning me for the role of composer on her thesis film "‘End was Here’ I asked her why she wanted me to score her film. Serafine’s answer was that she liked my ‘underwater shark music’ better than other musicians’ underwater shark music.‘La Buffadora’ doubles down on this newly baptised genre of underwater shark music and is composed almost entirely from samples of water. However, given that the name of the geyser is literally ‘blowhole’, it seemed antithematic to make shark music, and I always considered it more underwater killer whale music.
The geyser itself is amazing to watch, powered entirely by waves, one watches and waits as the water swells and subsides in and out of the aquatic canyon which produces the upward blast. I wanted to harness this dramatic effect into my composition and chose a very noisy sound palette to work with, seemingly to great affect. This composition has appeared in many forms through the years,
premiered at a music festival in Los Angeles called ‘Resistance Fluctuations 1998’, however under a different title: Belle d'Abondon the dancer and movement artist Tanya ‘Blood’ Hinkel used La Buffadora as the accompaniment to her Choreography titled Messiah and it was performed by her group Project 423 with dancers wearing contact body microphones in the small black-box theatre of RESISTANCE FLUCTUATIONS (imagine extreme but controlled feedback!!) I shared the concert with Marina Rosenfeld .
Portions of La Buffadora are also featured in the 1998 Film Alethea by fellow Calartians Denis Lelong, and Mariela Cadiz
Programmatic narrative
Imagine a gathering of Orca Pods off the coast of a sub-arctic feeding watershed which starts as a joyous congress of hundreds of killer whales and slowly turns into an absolute feeding frenzy culminating in a massive slaughter and devouring of seals such that the water is churning foamy red like a bloody mary in the blender. As slowly as the feeding frenzy starts, it ends abruptly when the last seal is sacrificed to the hunger of the alpha Orca, after which the whales swim off to the idyllic marinescape of their ancient breeding waters where they proceed to... well: pair off in contented enthusiasm and gusto, ending with a leisurely swim-about, daydreaming in their own underwater post-coital bliss.
