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Best of 2026

Rolando Chia

Entrega / Batelages (LP)

Label: Aurora Central

Format: LP

Genre: Experimental

Preorder: late May

€32.50
VAT exempt
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Two cassette releases by Mexico City experimentalist Rolando Chia, heard by almost no one on their original release, now appear on vinyl for the first time. Batelages and Entrega - sound collage, concrete texture, extended guitar - two lost chapters of the Latin American underground.

Black Vinyl. Edition of 100. Rolando Chia is among the most restlessly inventive and least documented figures to emerge from Mexico City's experimental underground. Active since the early 1980s under his own imprint Laudano - where he released intricate guitar works built around alternative tunings and extended techniques, each issued with tablatures and detailed compositional notes - Chia pursued a practice that resisted easy classification from the outset. He was equally at home in the intimate solitude of minimal folk, the collective electronic drift of Vistas Fijas, and the radical sound collage experiments he conducted with a shifting cast of collaborators throughout the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

Entrega / Batelages collects two recordings from that latter world - works that circulated in tiny cassette editions within a small circle of Mexico City experimentalists and were heard by almost no one. They appear on vinyl here for the first time. Side A presents Batelages (1991), 26 uninterrupted minutes of sound collage and improvisation recorded under the project name P.I.B. (Producto Interno Bruto) with Darsel Salinas, a non-musician drawn into the studio by Chia's conviction that anyone willing to listen and respond could generate meaningful sound. The raw material was an abandoned sound sculpture at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte of the UNAM, encountered in 1986. The original cassette release came housed in a hand-printed serigraphy booklet larger than the cassette itself. What emerged from those sessions is dense, architecturally complex, and closer in sensibility to the concrete and institutional explorations of early European electroacoustic practice than to anything else circulating in the Latin American underground of its day.

Side B holds Entrega (1992), the only release in Chia's catalogue to fold his avant-garde guitar practice directly into the fabric of sound collage and texture. Dodecaphonic scales and open tunings are layered against accumulated strata of string composition, each element recorded within the constraints available - the limitations becoming the logic. An outtake remix is included. The original cassette edition ran to one hundred copies.

Remastered from the original master tapes. Artwork scanned and restored. Accompanied by new liner essays by Rolando Chia in Spanish and English, and never-before-seen studio photographs. Limited edition of 200 copies: 100 on black vinyl, 100 on crystal clear vinyl