See also: Oksana Linde - Travesías
Buh open their 2025 with two stunning collections surveying the activity of Latin pioneers, Venezuela's Oksana Linde and Spain's Eduardo Polonio. Travesías is the second record Buh have issued of Linde's, and can be read as a companion piece of sorts to 2022's Aquatic and Other Worlds since it draws it's material from a very similar mid 80s period, though three pieces here were composed specifically for the Travesía Acuastral concert hosted in 1991 and others run as late as 1994. The nineties timestamp is a curious one, with ethereal, new age-adjacent electronic music of this kind was beginning to lose some of its cache at this point. If this meant the spotlight (the little she would have had) was drawn away from Linde, then it doesn't seem to be to any detrimental effect - these are beautifully constructed, cavernous cathedrals of sound that state an affinity with the shadowlands of imperial-era 4AD and Hecker-like drone as much as they do Suzanne Ciani or Berlin School electronics. Magical stuff. The Eduardo Polonion anthology documents a different space and time, covering his early electroacoustic experiments between 69-81. It's a bold selection, reminiscent in its early stages of the explorations of someone like Stockhausen and associates before shifting into an entirely different zone of inner space wandering, perhaps akin to Popul Vuh's Affenstunde or Cluster's Sowiesoso, fellow Europeans with an interest in the psychic hinterlands. It ends with open-ended possibilities, the nine minute long 'Continuo' a repeat-phrase, blues guitar-led heater that spirals off into the endless void. Polonio, as with Linde, is certainly cerebral in his approach, but as with his Venezuelan counterpart, the feeling of an adventurous spirit is what carries the music into new, inspiring realms. Doubly magical stuff.
