Francisco del Pino/Charlotte Mundy “The Sea” cassette (Notice)

The Sea is a fine example of a beautiful exchange between composer and performer, with Francisco del Pino’s precise and rhythmically intricate compositions brought vividly to life by Charlotte Mundy’s clear, subtly emotive and powerful voice. Despite having unmistakable reference points in early polyphony, The Sea employs harmonies, rhythms, and articulations that reach out gently but firmly. The repetition of syllables in “Material” brings out the thrill of small changes: sudden chords, dissonances, the fleeting emotion of Mundy’s meticulous phrasing. By contrast, “The Sea”—a text by Victoria Cóccaro—foregrounds words in a layered, roiling bed composed of ruminations on water, creation, mysteries of existence, and ecstatic passions for the mundane and beautiful. Repeated phrases and lines form a loamy foundation from which unfurls an expansive wave-like monologue that, through Mundy’s voice, alternately resembles a mantra, a recitation, and a desperate prayer. Simultaneously grieving, wildly optimistic, and in love with life. The layering of words necessitates a particular way of listening; comprehending only some phrases above the fray, with such fragmentation leading to heightened, momentary resonances as the brain tries to stay afloat. In a profound way, this deeply generous performance also brings to mind the role of recording technologies—multitrack digital recording, editing, panning, reverbs—in achieving a level of precision almost absolute in terms of both performance and emotional intent.

PDF link to poem in English and Spanish can be viewed here:
drive.google.com/file/d/1ndemVvNkucpGz5KmtiAR2KrCMO_8ALhI/view?usp=drive_link
Purchase of the album includes this as a file and scans of the artwork.

“The Sea” is a long poem made up of names waiting to be conjured on the page: waves carved on rocks, clams like white neon lights. The sea, not only with its movements, with its sound, but also with its rays and reflections. The present before it dissolves. The poem investigates a world distilled, vaporized, and once again condensed in a new space, where time goes on simultaneously with its influences and recesses, tides and colored fish waiting to be discovered at the bottom of the sea. A discovery of a sea made up of naming, inside a word, a word that like a life, sleeps, until no more.
– Rebekah Smith

Essentially a sort of gigantic round canon, “Material” was written as a companion to “The Sea”. These two works, while performable as standalone pieces, are meant to form a unit, each functioning as a refracted mirror for the other. The music of “The Sea”, like its title, evokes fluidity and expansiveness and is fundamentally free-flowing; “Material”, on the other hand, is recursive, self-referential, and heavily process-based. In “The Sea”, the drama is in the words; “Material”, contrarily, seeks expression through abstraction. My governing metaphor, however, is in both cases the same: the contemplation of a suspended present, a present that like liquid, seethes slowly until completely evaporating.

“The Sea” is my third setting of poetry by Victoria Cóccaro, and probably the one in which music and text are more inextricably linked. It was my intention, rather than putting the words to music, to build a sonic space that would hopefully echo that of the text—a highly visual poem that reflects on the act of writing, and on the passing of time and the passing of life, with the precision of a topographic map.
– Francisco del Pino