Efraín Rozas - Still LP

Have you noticed that Western music emphasizes linear time? Melody is a continuous sequence of sounds. Harmony and rhythm follow a progression from beginning through climax and resolution. Is it possible to have an art that is based on non-linear time? Can we even experience non-linear time?

Efraín Rozas’ Still posed this question in the form of an installation made for quadraphonic sound, architecture and light. Still was first developed at Queenslab as part of a one-month residency with The Kitchen, New York City in April 2021. This album is a live, stereo room recording of Still as it was presented over three one-hour viewings.

During a residency hosted by The Kitchen at Queenslab, Peruvian composer, performer, and software developer Efraín Rozas created a new sound installation titled Still. Rozas developed the conceptual framework for Still during a global pandemic that has disturbed Western thought at its core, radically reorienting the ways that we structure life according to capitalist demands, and proving the unsustainability of human life at its prior pace. These changes made clear the need to rethink the ways that the foundational concepts of our existence are reliant upon a conception of linear time. For Rozas, being—rather than a condition which solely relates to life and death—has to do more with expansive biological and emotional networks that come before us and will last after us. Rozas asks us to consider what we can achieve if we acknowledge the realities of cyclical, pendular, parallel, static, and virtual time. Still aims to generate a synesthetic experience of silence in which the act of listening is not isolated from other senses.

“In the sound performance ‘Still’ I confront the audience with an ontology of the non-quantifiable, through the union of space and time, and the re-integration of the senses.” - Efraín Rozas

Efraín Rozas is a Peruvian interdisciplinary artist working with Latin American music, robotics, sculpture and installation. He holds a PhD in composition and ethnomusicology from New York University, and is a 2023-2024 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. He has published Fusión: a soundtrack for Peru, a publication, video documentary, and music compilation; and has released several albums internationally via Names You can Trust, the Ethnomusicology Institute of Peru, the Embassy of Spain and Buh Records.