"Diario sonoro • Japón is the debut solo album by musician and composer Lucas Sierra, better known as a member of the Madrid-based indie trio La Paloma. Somewhere in early September 2023, he boards a flight from Hong Kong, and what follows is less a tourist diary, as the title might suggest, than a portrait of finding one's own position in a state of being elsewhere.

Diario sonoro • Japón chronologically follows Lucas's route through Japan, finding the country in an in-between moment: when the lifting of travel and entry restrictions brought tourist numbers close to pre-pandemic levels, even as hospitalisation figures quietly broke records due to the ongoing presence of the still-uncontrolled virus. What is present is a sense of limbo, caught in a single moment in time and place, yet somehow outside both. It is this anonymity that a metropolis can offer that shapes the mood throughout the album. This is most present on the second track, where the repetitive sound of an ambulance siren echoes down a wide street, soothed by the gentleness of falling raindrops, creating an impression of a city as something seen through glass rather than touched.

All of these fragments of the everyday were spontaneously recorded on Lucas's phone, whose unpredictable lo-fi compression gives a certain distance to the recordings – a distance that, paradoxically, does not act as a limitation. Like a fog, it places the listener outside the frame, while the story unfolds elsewhere. This anonymity is broken midway through the album, as he enters a bar in Shimokitazawa during its peak hours. The overwhelming charivari of omnipresent chit-chat and arriving drinks gives way to an almost intimate sense of dizziness, experienced alongside Lucas. Here, the distance collapses with a recorded visit to the bar's restroom, transforming the album into something closer and deceptively intimate. From this point on, one continues alongside Lucas, who, in the track that follows, suddenly finds himself recovering from a heady night in the bustling streets of Osaka.

What makes this record, and situates you within a place, is not merely the curation of found sound and its narratively precise logic. Threaded beneath the field recordings are Lucas's own ambient, occasionally drone-like guitar improvisations, blurring the line between a diary and a composition, until it is unclear which one is dreaming the other. Here sits a deeply personal agency, forming a record that, through its intimacy, offers to share not only the journey, but also its lived reality alongside the protagonist." - Ján Solčáni