Hailing from Argentina, QOA (Nina Corti) is a musician and sound artist who seeks to remedy this aural dysbiosis. Sauco is a fertile and bracing voyage into the Argentinian wilderness, a journey both mournful and healing—an effort to trace what has been lost, what remains, and what might return. Each of SAUCO’s nine tracks draws its name and inspiration from a lifeform (be it plant, animal, lichen, insect) native to QOA’s homeland. These songs are carefully crafted offerings to their namesakes: attempts to study, honor, and convey the essence of the thing. Perhaps even we might consider these songs to be collaborations between QOA and this humble roster of entities—collaborations with often therapeutic applications. What, for example, can we as individuals draw from the Sambucus Nigra or Black Sauco—the tree that serves as the album’s title track (and which grows, coincidentally, both in QOA’s Argentina as well as Leaving Records’ home-base of Los Angeles)?

Rootedness, the track suggests. Aspiration. A gentle vertical yearning of sky and earth. QOA’s artistic practice is expansive, incorporating not only recorded music, but audio-visual performances and sound installations.

They describe these immersions as sites of potential collaboration between human and nonhuman life, opportunities to dream up, collectively, more nourishing, embodied futures. That QOA has also spent the past several years as a committed member of an experimental Gamelan collective should come as no surprise, what with the Balinese tradition’s communal, recursive, and generative tendencies. (Gamelan, like the buzz of insect wings, is an ever-present reference throughout SAUCO). Uniting all of these efforts, QOA seeks to cultivate the conditions, the “soil,” that might encourage the emergence of hybridized new / old sounds. Conceptually rigorous, SAUCO is nevertheless a soothing, often joyful listen. Generally straddling the slippery boundary separating ambient and dance music (with a healthy supplemental dose of environmental recordings), incidental delights abound: moments of organic rupture (ex: “Muiti’s” melodic raindrop preamble). It is a song collection suffused with concern for interdependence, co-creation, and an almost prayerful attention to minutia and microcosm—a release that rewards (in different ways, and to varying extents) both active and passive listening.

We do offer this final note: those individuals craving a certain kind of deeper experience of SAUCO are encouraged to google each track’s namesake for accompanying “tecnonatural” edification.