Ale Hop is an artist, researcher, and experimental instrumentalist. She composes electronic and electroacoustic music, by blending strains of noise, pop, avant-garde, ambient and a complex repertoire of extended techniques for electric guitar and real-time sampling devices which she uses as her sound vocabulary to craft a performance of astonishing physical intensity, saturated of layers of distortion and stunning atmospheres.
Her body of work includes immersive multichannel installations, live performances, sound sculptures, video, 3D, composition and sound design for theater, dance and film, releases, academic publications, and workshops. The Life of Insects is her fourth studio album.
The composer began to craft the album The Life of Insects after spending one month living with different types of insects in her home studio, which she bought from a local insect dealer in Berlin and built little terrariums to record them for the sound design of a film she was working on.
Nonetheless, the album is not comprised of compositions based specifically on sound recordings of the insects, but it unfolds as an imagined world recomposed through speculated narrative and abstract elements that seek to portray their lives<span><span class="bcTruncateEllipsis">...</span></span><span class="bcTruncateMore" style="display:none">, assembling sounding stories that could be re-constructed in the mind of the active listener.
For this purpose, the artist came up with a musical language that could hold this fictional universe, comprised principally of several layers and textures of guitars that mimic environmental and atmospheric sounds.
The Life of Insects will be released October 23 on Buh Records
Watch the psychedelic video for the album opener 'La procesión' below.
Listen &amp; Watch: Ale Hop - La procesión (Official Music Video)
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Side A
1 La procesión
2 The Life of Insects
3 Pollinators
Side B
4 The Way to the Ocean
5 Someday We'll Dance Again
6 The Pearl Diver
7 Jungle Depredation
Supported by Initiative Musik gGmbH with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media</span><span>&nbsp; <a>more</a></span>releases January 21, 2021

All music composed, recorded and produced by Ale Hop
Mastered by Manmade Mastering, Berlin, Germany.
Mastering Engineer: Tim Xavier
Artwork by Ale Hop
BR141
October 2020

The new album by the Peruvian-born / Berlin-based experimental artist Ale Hop was conceived in a context of immobility and provides six sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience. In collaboration with Ana Quiroga, Concepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M’balla, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño,
KMRU, Manongo Mujica, Moises Horta, Nicole L’huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau, Tomas Tello.
Following her explorations on music's inherent fixation to geographic space and time, be it through the longing of home ("Apophenia" 2019) or scientific magnification of invisible worlds ("The Life of Insects" 2020), Berlin-based Peruvian-born experimental composer Ale Hop's fourth album, "Why Is It They Say a City Like Any City?", was conceived in a context of immobility. During the lockdown months, she started a process of remote collaboration, by sending messages, posted from various
cities along a South American trip, to thirteen musicians from around the world. She journaled her impressions upon these places to an intimate fictional character while reflecting on matters of time, sound, space, cosmology and colonial memory. The thirteen musicians dialogued with this voice by taking upon the challenge of... responding to the messages with sound collaborations.
Field recordings, mouth drumming, drone cellos, electronic loops, arrhythmic rhythms and voices came back from this experiment. Ale assembled them, by layering, twisting and turning, into sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience, making it the first time she's set her guitar aside. Expect no answers to the album's title question, but an innermost psychedelic rumination.
"Despite the technological resources that appear to dilute distances, the simulation of closeness mirrored on the digital space is an emptied body, a state of precarity, a flat surface; unable to withhold an experience of exchange," Ale states. "So, I began this project by asking myself, how
can we escape from the reduced experience of the virtual? The idea behind this experiment was that my messages and the places they describe could drive the composition, be a catalyzer, a score. Thus, to use geography as a tool to remember and imagine, to allow new soundscapes to emerge."
"Memory, diffuse and divergent, sometimes reaches out to the future in its search for form, taking shape from the reflections and echoes that come back … like throwing a rock in a pond and having a rock thrown back at you."