BALVANERA - Hasta tocar el fondo vacío del lenguaje
The long-awaited return by the Buenos Aires duo arrives as an attempt to push Balvanera’s artistry to its limits, focusing on language and sound as expressive forms. With all tracks sung in Spanish, the album is simultaneously both a declaration of identity and an exercise in the Spanish language, with the group playing with a language that can sometimes be perceived as baroque and turn it into something starker and more singular while still retaining its richness. Musically direct, the album occasionally returns to a minimalism reminiscent of the band's early releases while preserving the intensity and club-oriented feel of their more recent work. At times intensifying in speed, the record shapeshifts between the energy of their live performances and an unsettling dreamlike atmosphere. Rather than adhering to genre conventions, Balvanera fully commits to their own singular vision, allowing each track to find its own form as the album moves between different emotional states.
The title Hasta tocar el fondo vacío del lenguaje (Until Touching the Empty Bottom of Language) is borrowed from a fragment of Arturo Carrera’s poem, Escrito con un nictógrafo (Written with a Nyctograph), and it offers a clue to Balvanera’s nocturnal sensibility: evoking those thoughts and images that can only emerge in the sleepless hours of the night or in dreams, when they acquire their most revealing edge. Following in the vein of Carrera, the album explores the concept of death as something that is hidden within language. Even though bereavement runs as an undercurrent throughout the album, the nervous tension that has always characterized Balvanera’s sound persists, manifesting as a vivid pulse that runs throughout.
