| Format: EP |

| First Release: January 2000 |

| Label: Casa-Ray |

| Composed: November and December 1999 |

| Recorded: November and December 1999 |

| Instruments: Piano |

| # Tracks: 3 | Length: 25:21 |

First release in January 2000. My debut.

This first EP collects three pieces for solo piano written and recorded between November and December of 1999 under the names of “Ensayos sobre Música Esporádica -Music Sporadic Essays- No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3”.

«Sporadic music» was the global term that then I used to refer to a range of techniques of composition that I had in mind for something like a “new language or aesthetic of making music”, borrowed from different musical context of avant-garde (mainly Minimalism and Expressionism) and of my own. The basic ideas was to use all these techniques as a “composition map, geometry or arithmetic” by which one or more of the different musical elements (especially rhythm, melody, tonality, modality and structure) were affected by a continuous process of transmutation and instability, constantly changing by means of harmonic relations, games of additions and subtractions, retrogade expositions of previous schemes, logical transformations, sudden ruptures, and a few more crazy things like these…

Then I was very interested in the piano and the experimental theorical composition of music on the paper -they were my college years-, and during months I was thinking about all these ideas. So, this EP is the culmination to real life of all this.

The composition based on «sporadic music» is a very creative, intuitive and unpredictable work, making rules, use them and later break them at all to do and mix new rules and so on… The result is minimalist and reiterative, expressionist and unstable, surrealist sometimes, always interesting… Since then, I have never returned so hard to this style of composition, but anyway has been a recurring element in my music, because we can find it in later pieces such as: Las Cinco Construcciones de Babel (2000), Jazz en Clave Mínimo-Andalusí (2002), The Great Old One (2009, Cautiva project) or Ramifications Dans L’Escalier Du Diable (2011, György Ligeti cover).

In the first track (Essay No. 1), the “sporadic” ideas weren’t only used to work on usual musical elements (melody, metric and so on), but also on the own genre of composition. So, the first section is minimalist, the second section is chromatist, later expressionist, etc., finishing with ambient music.

In the second track (Essay No. 2, translated as “The Madman and the Girl”), the ideas of sporadic composition ride along two each other dependent musical lines (the “left hand – the mad man” and the “right hand – the girl”), being the sporadic speech especially based on the –sporadic– musical development of short motives and themes. «El Loco y la Niña» –based on movements of minor chords and with a complex and interesting micro-structure (maybe it’s my favourite of the three essays)– is a dramatic and hyperactive composition, mix of violence and very delicate care…

Finally, the third track (Essay No. 3) is a Philip Glass’ «Modern Love Waltz» (1978) cover piece. Reconstructed and recorded on 28th of December of 1999, it’s a “sporadic, retrograde and infinite” version of Philip Glass’ composition. The title of the track (translated as “Drawing Infinite Cycles Going and Coming in Time”) describes what is happening in the music. First, you’ll listen the piece “going” in direct or normal sense (adaptation of the main original exposition, until approximately 2:30 minute); next, you’ll listen the piece “coming” in retrogade or inverse sense (backwards), returning so until the beginning of the musical speech… to go and come again and again forever! This recording shows two complete expositions (going-coming and going-coming), but you can repeat the track as many times as you want to follow the original concept of the essay.

This EP was originally released -with «Lluvia de Mayo» (CD-S, 2000)- as a promo preview of an upcoming album to be released in summer of 2000 and called «Tres Piezas de Tres» (translated as “Three Pieces of Three”; these three music sporadic essays, three romantic poems and the piece in three movements «Orgía Tonal en Partitura de Cristal»). Finally this album was never released. Don’t ask why!

Cover artwork by Sara Valiente. Sleeve design by José Travieso.

This EP was remastered in 2008.

You can download and get this EP on Bandcamp.