Composer's Note

I left Puerto Rico in the summer of 2005 at the age of 12, having lived there my entire life. As the plane lifted from the tarmac, within my heart there awoke a desire shared, perhaps, by all diasporic Puerto Ricans: an implacable urge to return to the island—a place that exists as the numinous centroid of the creation myth of my identity.

VHS Tapes: Puerto Rico, 1998 is a dreamlike work that makes audible this urge, its implacability, and the search for home—home as a place, but also as a time.

Just as leaving a busy street and entering a cathedral seems to transport one from profane space into sacred space. This work seeks to transport the listener from profane time into sacred time. And not just any sacred time, but the sacred time, when the mythical symbols that make up this part of the mosaic of my syncretic identity first exploded into being.

This desire to reinvoke a primordial past is keenly counterbalanced by the subjectivity of memory, its propensity for decay, and by the reality that one can never truly go back to a place that requires a past version of both the place and oneself to experience.

VHS Tapes: Puerto Rico, 1998 draws upon musical motifs from traditional Puerto Rican music, anthems recast as sacred invocations that effloresce, transform, and degrade in a mist of decaying memory. The result is a kind of Orchestral Vaporwave, stirring memories—both real and imagined—of a specific place and time that perhaps never existed to begin with, and yet is palpably ever-present within our hearts.

Cheers.