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Music: Sandra Muciño & Enrique Mendoza

Audio Mixing and Mastering: Enrique Mendoza

Recording Engineer: Enrique Mendoza

Graphic design: Alejandro Criollo

Text: Sandra Muciño & Enrique Mendoza

Photography: Bogy Nagy

 

Producer: Enrique Mendoza

Editor: Axel Retif


EchoScope – Studio for Sonic Illusion and Spatial Composition, February 2025, Viena Austria

The Gentle Motion of an Abrasive Touch

an electroacustic album by Enrique Mendoza and Sandra Muciño   


This album unfolds from the tension between tenderness and friction, breath and circuit, gesture and resistance. Performed and recorded live through a series of improvisational performances, The Gentle Motion of an Abrasive Touch captures the intimate dialogue between two performers, Enrique Mendoza on live electronics and Sandra Muciño on a deconstructed bassoon, engaged in a raw, responsive exploration of sound.


About the album

This album unfolds from the tension between tenderness and friction, breath and circuit, gesture and resistance. Performed and recorded live through a series of improvisational performances, The Gentle Motion of an Abrasive Touch captures the intimate dialogue between two performers, Enrique Mendoza on live electronics and Sandra Muciño on a deconstructed bassoon, engaged in a raw, responsive exploration of sound.

At the heart of the project lies a paradox: while the sonic textures lean into distortion, noise, and spectral abrasion, the act of making them was one of attentive listening and delicate interaction. Harshness was not imposed but discovered, shaped through sensitivity. This is a music of contact, where every abrasive gesture is the result of gentle motion.

Mendoza manipulates a volatile setup of Strega and Benjolin synthesisers, feeding their signals, and the live bassoon, through spectral processing tools that stretch and fragment the timbre in real time. Muciño’s bassoon, altered and extended beyond its traditional voice, becomes both source and surface: splintering air, creaking wood, shrieking metal, and sometimes, singing.

The album unfolds like a cycle of disintegration and renewal. Each track is a stage in a ritual process of sonic decomposition, where corrosion, fracture, and residue are not endpoints but transitions. They do not resolve, they pulse, scrape, shimmer, and breathe. Together, they navigate a tactile sonic terrain where chaos is not destruction but transformation.

 

Sandra Muciño. Bassoonist and improviser graduated from the Escuela Superior de Música. In 2020, she completed a diploma in performance at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria.

She has performed at festivals such as Ars Electronica, Unsafe and Sounds, Wien Modern, Chilli Jazz Congress, and Neofonia. As an improviser, she is constantly experimenting, which has led her to collaborate with various artists in Austria and Mexico to create performances that question her relationship with sound, the body, and the stage. HINDRANCE, Unmuted Gasps, and Saying not saying are some of the performances she has staged.

In the field of composition, her works have been performed in the Resonancias Series (UNAM), in Santiago de Chile, at Bruckner Universität, San Diego Flute Guild, and at the Krama Festival (Greece). In 2024, she presented a collaborative paper at the NIME conference entitled “Suggested Practices for Creating an Inclusive Hackerspace for Music/Sound/NIMEs.”

She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Postdigital Lutherie, focusing on the design of new musical interfaces.

 

Enrique Mendoza. Born in Mexico City and based in Vienna, Enrique Mendoza is an electroacoustic composer and performer working with spatial audio, hybrid listening, and multichannel sound practices. His work explores perception, memory, and transformation through listening, combining fixed-media composition, and live electronic processes. He works extensively with ambisonics, binaural audio, analog & digital synthesis, and large-scale multichannel systems, developing pieces that adapt to specific architectural and listening environments.

 

Since 2019, he has been a professor at the National School of Cinematographic Arts, UNAM, MX. Enrique holds a Master’s degree from the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He is pursuing a Doctor of Arts degree at Anton Bruckner University (Linz, Austria), where he has also been teaching Electroacoustic Music since 2021.

www.enriquemendoza.net