Photo: Treylegit
Accomplished musician, producer, multi-instrumentalist, educator, and scholar Alex E. Chávez is perhaps best known as a member of Chicago-based Latinx quintet Dos Santos, but he has been involved with a multitude of other unique projects and stellar collaboration in the music world for over two decades. Chávez has announced the release of his debut solo album, Sonorous Present, arriving on October 18th through Artivist Entertainment. In the works for nearly four years, the album features Quetzal Flores on production duties, poetry from acclaimed author and poet Roger Reeves, field recordings, and guest contributions from the likes of Mexican poet and huapango musician Guillermo Velázquez, Martha Gonzalez, Aloe Blacc, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso, amongst many others. Sonorous Present embodies personal themes such as identity, borders, family, life and death, and is inspired by his book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño as well as by the lives and deaths of close family members.
Coinciding with the album’s announcement, Chávez has unveiled the lead single ‘cómplices de luto’ (accomplices in mourning), a beautiful, radiant and emotionally engaging track featuring duet vocals by Chávez and Laura Cambrón. Of the song, Chávez comments:
“I wrote this song in the wake of my mother’s passing, as I reflected on the final year of her life—I was living and working in Mexico at that time, and so I didn’t spend much time with her that year. I was angry and guilt-ridden about that for some time. And as I wrote, the image that lingered in my mind was of me as a child—missing her when she way away, her warmth, her approval, her embrace. Writing through those feelings was necessary in my own grieving. Relatedly, in the video, the sense of longing is represented by the butterfly encountered by a figure who is crossing—both the desert border, the river and the threshold between life and death.”
‘cómplices de luto’ comes with an animated video directed by Estudio Pneuma in collaboration with Celestial Brizuela, and you can watch it below.