Connecting with a musical voice isn’t always about hearing something glossy and finished. Sometimes, with the chaos and horrors around us, that perfectly-ordered kind of music can even cease to make sense. These electronic emanations from FAX, the Baja California, Mexico-based producer, are like a salve, like cool water for the soul.
Maybe that’s why I even gravitate to writing about tools. I don’t know about you, but as much as I enjoy the perfectly-honed opus, there would be times when you’d hear the half-finished track, the production between one idea and another idea, and say – yes. That’s it!
It doesn’t always happen when these productions are new, though. So I can understand why the Static Discos co-founder and Facade Electronics founder is releasing his Archiveo 2001-2009 in 2025. It’s not nostalgia or looking back, but as you hear the collection, it’s a history that now has context and can be assembled into order. I swear there’s something about the human brain that can only reflect on our own behavior about 10-20 years after the fact, so it follows we’d sometimes only really grok our own musical evolution in the same cycles and waves.
I’ve long loved and followed FAX’s music and the projects he constructed around him in Baja. These tracks seemed to find me this week. Funny enough, I was also connecting to San Francisco glitch and finding German clicks and cuts at the same time, so maybe now we all have a similar distance.
But while he talks about his references, there’s such a specific personality that comes out here. It’s easy-flowing and inventive. The b-sides all find a uniquely playful direction, a collection of delightful misfits.
Even more deeply, what I discovered I needed to hear this week was 1024 Séance, a set of invocations or meditations played over a livestream. That medium seems to shape these reflections – that feeling of being between being alone and being with a crowd, somewhere halfway in an electronic liminal. It’s like a concert in the digital plane of The Wired.
Here are those live sessions (with details):
I wrote about Arash Azadi and his Universe in Prayer. Rubén’s music here almost makes an ideal diptych, a kind of perfect mirror opposite. It’s another way to center the nervous system. And I think it needed to be recorded live in this way – it captures the living organism of this music in just the right moment of it breathing.
1024 Séance was what I most wanted to share, but it’s not a bad idea to listen to them together. We’re fortunate to know one another in different stages of life, to see the throughlines and see the spirit underneath remaining through all the changes.
You turn on the news, and you see horrors. You talk to friends and family, and you experience more horrors. A lot of you have had them come directly to your doorstep, literally. So you wonder if music is really particularly worth the investment of time and energy, or if it means anything. But then, just as we can sometimes use words to reach one another, there are those bits of time and space when that shared language in music can calm each other down, shuffle the emotions back into a form.
So even though these are simpler jams than some of FAX’s other excellent albums, this week I could put them on repeat and find that calm. There’s séance, the session. But yes, there’s séance, the feeling of bringing ghosts we both knew in another life back together in the room for company. It’s beautiful when it happens with sound. It’s not a trick.