Bosques de mi Mente’s first release, Trenes de Juguete (Toy Trains) received an Honorable Mention in last year’s TSB wrapup, and his follow-up, Lo-Fi, was reviewed by TSB earlier this year. While listening to Ruido Blanco, I was blown away by the progress made in the intervening months. This new album trumps its predecessors in multiple categories: composition, emotion, and level of risk. Bosques de mi Mente (“Forests of My Mind”) takes some real chances on this album, forays that take him far from his comfort zone. The listener’s appreciation –or lack thereof – will hinge on these unexpected turns.

The album begins with what sounds like a shortwave transmission awash in a bed of static. After a minute, the familiar Bosques de mi Mente piano flourishes make their first appearance, along with a mournful violin. But stop, wait a minute, rewind – were those instruments actually embedded in the static? Yes, they were; due to a trick of the ear, they began as indistinguishable noises, like the chaos in the first chapter of Genesis. This first track, pervaded with a slight melancholy, sets the tone for the rest of the album. Time and time again throughout the recording, the ivory that controls the mallets is pressed with such tender hesitation as to conjure up feelings of mourning, of isolation, of lost innocence. “La linea del horizonte,” in particular, is ineffably sad, and yet infinitely listenable. 

Only after I had played the album a dozen times or more did I begin to read more about the artist, and I discovered that Ruido Blanco was indeed written during a time of loneliness and disconnect. The pianist composed the album after leaving his family and friends behind and moving to Madrid. The loneliness echoes from the cracks between the keys, touching on regret but never quite toppling into despair. Instead of derailing the artist, the move seems to have inspired him, gifting him with a touch of the artistic temperament, the almost-mad fire that operates as a creative muse. While prior releases had demonstrated great compositional prowess, they had often offered a flat affect – not so in this case.

Now to the controversial section: the additional facets of the album which will end up being either the selling point or the breaking point for most listeners. Over the course of the album, various field recordings, samples and studio tricks are brought in to enhance the mood and drive the aural narrative. The first arrived at the very beginning of the album. The next is the ambient second track, only 1:20 in length but far preferable to the 10:50 of the fourth track on Trenes de Juguete. I must offer a slight complaint about the inclusion of children at play on tracks three and ten, only because this is already the fourth album I’ve encountered this year to use the same idea. And while the backwards masking of “Sientocetenta segundos en el pasado part 1” is effective, the brief French monologue at the end is distractingly loud. (The second and third parts fare much better.) 

“Y en aquellos dias” is the album’s most daring track, beginning with a blast of feedback and descending swiftly into drone. As the patterns begin to settle, a somber sample of Revelation 9:6 is introduced: "And in those days, men shall seek death and shall not find it; and they shall desire to die and death shall fly from them. " To me, this sample was the turning point on the album, the moment in which I stopped and realized, hey, there’s something really noteworthy going on here. As a fan of the gothic-industrial scene of the 90’s, I appreciated the sample; as a fan of the Hecker school of drone, I enjoyed the music; and as a reviewer, I admired the counterbalance. When the clean piano tones returned a track later, they no longer seemed as benevolent; instead, they sprung from the speakers like a brave effort to ward off the darkness. And perhaps they were. Perhaps for the artist, alone and friendless in a new city, composition became consolation; perhaps each note operated as a lifeline.

This dual infusion of melancholic mood and stubborn tenacity helps to lift Ruido Blanco above other piano-based instrumental albums, because the narrative of the recording lends itself easily to introspection. Most music lovers will easily admit that somewhere along the way they encountered an album that brought them through a period of depression, or even saved their lives. Often this is a function of chance: a certain album was purchased at a certain time, a song reminded them of a certain moment. Seldom are the lives of the artist during composition and the listener (who arrives months or years later), matched to such an extent than the very act of listening seems to produce a feeling of mutual empathy: the listener senses the pain of the composer, while simultaneously feeling that the composer has written the piece especially for them. And yet this is the case with Ruido Blanco. 

At the time of this writing, the composer may or may not have found inner peace: but he donates a hopeful coda to the album with the title track. This concluding piece begins and ends with the fuzzy tones and transmissions of the album opener, but stuck directly in the middle is a mostly unadorned, unabashedly happy sample of street singing, as if a parade is passing by, the world is beckoning, the windows are flung open, and above the formless and desolate earth, a voice is whispering, let there be light.

-Richard Allen