Photo: Leslie Mok

isabel crespo pardo is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across sound, performance, text and visual art. Now, under the new moniker iiisa, they are ready to release their solo electroacoustic debut album. Entitled tanto te he querido, which translates as “so much i’ve loved you”, the album arrives on October 2nd through Leaving Records and brings together field recordings, poemsongs and familial voices from their home in Costa Rica. Across its ten tracks, iiisa revisits fragments of past compositions and recordings collected over the last decade, reshaping them into an intimate meditation on memory, mortality, intergenerational trauma and hope. The album was created through an ongoing process of recomposition, with crespo pardo recording and producing it during a residency at Pioneer Works, while on tour and in the homes of loved ones. Speaking about their relationship with archival material, iiisa writes:

“Engaging in an ongoing dialogue with archival material has taught me so much.”

They continue:

“I wanted to offer my voice in the way I hear it when I’m alone. I wanted to bring people into the cave of my mind.”

Alongside the announcement, iiisa have also shared the album’s lead single, ‘aún siento la sombra’, a stirring track that confronts the painful conformity that, as they explain, “keeps us powerless”. Listen to it below.