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Susan Campos—Fonseca:
Minimal Aggression

Release: Sep 18, 2015

New York—based Colombian composer and pianist Julián De La Chica and Costa Rican composer, writer, and musicologist Susan Campos—Fonseca, PhD (Casa de las Américas Prize 2012), present Minimal Aggression—an album that serves as a mutual ‘interrogation’ of minimalism, its possibilities, and its trajectory in the 21st century.

This album can be seen as both a first "manifesto" and an artistic research project, where two worlds converge: independent creation (De La Chica) and academic thought (Campos—Fonseca).

Proudly presented by Irreverence Group Music [GM], Minimal Aggression is a sonic exploration in which Julián De La Chica and Susan Campos—Fonseca investigate the essence of minimal sound—unpretentious, ascetic, and abyssal. This is an act of resistance, a series of "nips" in a saturated society where "everything is felt," where we drown in the excess of "all that is possible," leaving us empty.

Listen to Katana

Minimal Aggression

Minimal Aggression cover

  • Format: Album
    Release: September 18, 2015
    Catalogue: IGM—005
    GTIN/EAN/UPC: 4050215144378
    Producer: IGM & Julián De La Chica
    Commissioned by Susan Campos—Fonseca & IGM

  • Various

  • Susan Campos—Fonseca

  • Elise Plain
    Juan Andrés García Román
    (Beauty, Death Songs);
    Marco Aguilar-Sanabria, (“profecía”, Butoh Meditations)

  • Campos—Fonseca — Minimal Aggression:

    Beauty, Death songs

    01. No. 1, Prologue
    02. No. 2, Yo no soy rubia
    03. No. 3, Snow white
    04. No. 4, She knows
    05. No. 5, Epilogue

    Butoh Meditations

    06. No. 1, Katana
    07. No. 2, Espino blanco
    08. No. 3, Prophecy (Profecía de los trenes y los almendros muertos)

  • Commissioned by Susan Campos—Fonseca
    & Irreverence Group Music
    Produced by [IGM] & Julián De La Chica
    Music by Susan Campos—Fonseca
    Lyrics by Elise Plain, Juan Andrés García Román
    & Marco Aguilar-Sanabria

    Susan Campos—Fonseca - Vocal & Piano
    Martha Mooke - Viola
    Ana Echandi - Vocal
    Julián de la Chica - Piano & Synths

    Recorded, mixed and mastered by Alex Sterling
    at Precision Sound Studios in New York, NY

    Album Notes by Susan Campos—Fonseca
    Artwork/Cover: IGM
    Photography by Susan Campos—Fonseca
    & Hassan Malik
    Videos by IGM

    Susan Campos—Fonseca (BMI)
    Manufactured and marketed
    by Irreverence Group Music (Brooklyn, NY)
    Made in US. Total time: 60 min
    Ⓟ & © IGM 2015

Susan Campos Fonseca

Susan Campos—Fonseca
Photo by Hassan Malik

¿Podemos imaginar un trazo más revelador que aquel que renuncia al histrionismo y a la gesticulación en favor de una expresividad más honda y sencilla? ¿Una sola linea viva, vibrante y líquida? ¿Una linea que contenga la espuma del mar? He aquí el empeño.

— Juan Barrero, Film director

Album NOTES
by Susan Campos—Fonseca

Minimal Aggression serves as both a manifesto and a research project, as both creators reflect on the challenges of choosing to be a minimalist today. Speaking of avant—garde art and transgression is, at its core, a historical act. The weight of historicism placed upon the creative process is perhaps one of the greatest challenges for a composer today. To create sound is to exist within a historical perspective.

The works gathered in this album embrace minimalism as a path toward an ascetic journey—where musical materials are reduced to their minimal structure, exploring the tension between sound and noise. Within this search, Noise and Poetry become articulative axes.

This project brings together Costa Rican sound artist Alejandro Sánchez Núñez and the poetry of Elise Plain, Juan Andrés García Román, Marco Aguilar Sanabria, and Susan Campos—Fonseca. It explores the boundaries between music and noise, sound and word, organic and cybernetic bodies, the human voice and the "inner jungle." The album features the voice of Ana Echandi, Martha Mooke’s viola, and sound engineering by Alex Sterling.

A dystopia of desire that pricks asceticism—just as the aggression captured by Frida Kahlo in her 1935 painting A Few Small Nips, which depicts the murder of a woman. The lover who stabbed her to death, in his defense, utters the phrase that crowns the work: "...but it was just a few small nips." The precision of this expression encapsulates the essence of Minimal Aggression.

Susan Campos-Fonseca, PhD
Musicologist and Composer

About the author

Campos-Fonseca holds a Ph.D. in music from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain. Master in Spanish and Latin American Philosophy from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), and graduated in Conducting by the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). She is a composer and musicologist whose research focuses on philosophy of culture and technology, feminism, decolonial studies, electronic art and sound studies.

Susan Campos—Fonseca
Photo by Hassan Malik

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