Paula Shocron: Los Vínculos

In a sense, every musician is in a dialog with his or her own past, reshaping lessons that have been learned long ago in a quest for a new expression. However, it is very rare to encounter a dialog that is as explicit as the one that takes place on Argentinian pianist Paula Shocron's solo record Los Vínculos.

The album is a dialog with a practice tape of a young Shocron playing J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. In a literal way, Shocron is playing with her past as she adds new layers of music to a classical foundation based on her own youthful interpretation of Bach. It is a meeting between the beauty of classical formalism and free music, but also an encounter between songs of innocence and experience. The young Shocron learning the most canonical of forms and the older Shocron moving into another challenging territory: the endless possibilities of freedom.

The most extreme example of the difference between the two worlds is the track "Caos." It throws the order of Bach into the abyss as the music sinks into a sea of forceful percussive dissonance and restless movement. It is not just a dissolving of form, but also a metamorphosis into something new. An example is "Un Lugar" where Bach's structure is punctuated by prickly notes that eventually form a new compositional shape only to return to a dialog with the practice tape that is far more harmonic than the earlier example of chaos.

It is a strange experience to listen to Los Vínculos. The past and present meet each other in an aural soundscape where subtle sound manipulations add to the atmosphere of the music. Shocron has not made an ordinary solo piano record, but then again, she is not an ordinary pianist.