Mary Anne Hobb's 'Techno Tuesday' track,
BBC R 6
Played by Deb Grant & Tom Ravenscroft on The New Music Fix,
BBC R 6
Premiered on Inverted Audio
Today Guatemalan producer Fer Franco announces his debut album Ritos de Paso (“Rites of Passage”) set for release Feb 9th, 2024, with lead techno single ‘Asumir Forma’ featuring Mabe Fratti, I. La Católica (Hector Tosta of Titanic) and Alex Hentze.
Over the past decade and a half, Franco has built up a prolific career in various different outfits. Franco’s album debut Ritos de Paso (“Rites of Passage”) molds a distinctive mix of noise rock, techno, ambient music and krautrock, the music’s eclecticism secondary to his main objective: to capture music that chases down a sense of joy and impulsiveness, unbound from structure or designated outcome. Franco: “I saw this music as my own rite of passage into ‘graduating’; becoming comfortable producing music in a way that felt like I was guiding the effort and the creative ideas.”
Blurring the lines between arranging and improvising, Franco has enlisted some of his closest collaborators of past and present: fellow Guatemalan composers Mabe Fratti and Alex Hentze, Mexico City stalwarts I. La Católica (Hector Tosta of Titanic) and UK musician Gary Burton, with whom he played in defunct Manchester alternative rock outfit Cosmos Collapse.
Lead single ‘Asumir Forma’, is an ethereal ambient techno track, featuring Mabe Fratti, I. La Católica (Hector Tosta) and Alex Hentze. It was conceived out of two separate ideas, miraculously coming together over a period of time, combining haunting layers of sound with a clanging, subaqueous pulse. This track is about taking shape, assuming form and becoming comfortable in one's own skin. It's a reflection on how this journey isn't straightforward.
Fer Franco on the track: “This was the most challenging piece to create, but it's one that I deeply resonate with. While producing the track, Alex and I put in a lot of effort to ensure the transitions flowed seamlessly. Hector's guitars and Mabe's cellos played a key role in pulling everything together, I felt their melodies give the track some of its eerie character and help it move forward. The track was finalised at Hugo Quezada's Progreso Nacional studio in CDMX, where we recorded the guitars, cellos, and his beautiful ARP Solina”.