Rolando Chia

Amazing find!  There are records that seem to exist outside of time, private cosmologies that take years to discover - and a lifetime to understand. Sara Juega Y..., the solitary studio album by Rolando Chía Pérez, belongs to this category of works: a ghost-record, released in 1986 in such a limited pressing as to be almost legendary, holding nine compositions of minimal folk of a rare, almost painful delicacy. For those who know Chía through his work with Vistas Fijas or his forays into experimental electronics documented on the mid-eighties EPs - the Tratado De Insectos De Metamorfosis Completas recorded with Darsel Salinas, or the 1988 compilation Los Valses De Al Ejandra - this album represents an enigma, a hidden door to another side of his poetics. Here there is no noise, no urban avant-garde of Mexico City: instead, there is an acoustic guitar that breathes, a voice that seems to speak to itself in the darkness of a room. The Mexican underground scene of the 1980s - the one that flourished on the margins of the Tianguis del Chopo, in improvised cafés and cultural centers - was an ecosystem of creative resistance. As Chía himself has recounted, making alternative music in that context meant facing the generalized indifference of the media, which branded these expressions as violent and devoid of aesthetic sense. Sara Juega Y... seems to be born precisely from this solitude, from a self-directed study of the guitar undertaken at the end of the seventies, when Chía realized that the popular sounds of his time would not take him where he wanted to go. The result is a record that approaches the tradition of American Primitivism - John Fahey, Robbie Basho - but filtered through a deeply personal, almost intimate sensibility. The nine tracks flow like pages of a musical diary: essential melodies, silences charged with meaning, a tension between fragility and precision that recalls certain moments of early Nick Drake or the barest recordings of Vashti Bunyan. There is a hidden lineage connecting this record to the European guitar explorations of the same era - particularly the 1976 album Guitares Dérive by Vincent Le Masne and Bertrand Porquet, released on Shandar. Both share a commitment to the acoustic guitar in its purest form, without special effects or studio manipulation, and both embrace what Daniel Caux described as "presenting a simplicity while ensuring that complexity remains hidden." Where the French duo wove pointillistic tapestries of interlocking notes, Chía pursues a more solitary path - but the same patient attention to the instrument's natural resonance, the same refusal of easy minimalist formulas, connects these distant points on the map of experimental folk.