Photo by Chad Ward
Drone/experimental solo artist MAULÉN today unveils a stunning, nine-minute video for “Rostro.” The track appears on El Miedo De Amar, part one of a two-part EP, released in September via Icons Creating Evil Art. The final EP — El Miedo De Amar Pero Igual Lo Hago — will be released on April 7th.
Named in honor of his grandmother, a member of the Mapuche people in Chile, MAULÉN (which translates to “a wet valley”) is the brainchild of composer/musician/artist Carlos Ibarra. Through careful collaboration with a multitude of artists, MAULÉN creates art with the ambition of manifesting something unique, beautiful, strange, and alluring.
El Miedo De Amar Pero Igual Lo Hagotranslates to “the fear of falling in love but I still do it.” MAULÉN released the first single from the two-part offering, “Rostro,” last Fall. Elaborated Ibarra, “This was the first song I wrote for this album back in 2019. The lyrics are about a connection I got with someone and in just a few days she was gone from my life forever. The song is a slow and beautiful monolith in Persian featuring Behzad Barazandeh on vocals. With an epic and melancholic mood, the song takes you on an journey inwards towards your inner darkness.”
The companion video for “Rostro” was created by close MAULÉN collaborator Johan Lundsten who has a very personal connection with what he put into this video, noting, “The theme of the video took form during a chapter of my life when I had a massive cancer scare; I found a huge lump in my stomach which led to five weeks of tests and hospital visits. I lost my mother to cancer in 2016 and I remember her telling me that the hardest part of the disease was not knowing; waiting for the next batch of test results, the next prognoses, the next percentage chance of remission or growth. The answer, regardless of which one, was often easier to deal with than waiting and not knowing.
“I kept envisioning the moment I would get a result, and what trajectory it would send me on. There was no way I could fight off my thoughts of death, so I chose to embrace them — I decided to practice dying. To accept that I only have a couple of months left despite not knowing that to be the case. The sense of clarity and gratitude for every single little thing around me was astounding. I felt closer to my memories of my mother than ever before. It was also an absolutely dreadful and lonely existence, since I didn’t tell anyone around me so as not to make them worried before I knew for a fact, I was sick — something that felt important at the time but I’m not sure I would do again. After five weeks of waiting, it turned out to be an extremely inflamed muscle in the abdomen. No cancer. I was left with a second chance at life, but before moving on I needed to manifest these dark fears in my mind through art. When I heard ‘Rostro,’ I knew right away that it was the right vessel. The video is a wordless journey through the mind, a meditation on the absoluteness of death, a depiction of non-return — a snapshot of the fever dream I lived during those five weeks. It has changed me in ways I don’t fully yet understand, and I hope to find connection with people through this video. We’re here a short while, but we’re not alone. ”
View MAULÉN’s “Rostro” video at THIS LOCATION.
El Miedo De Amar Pero Igual Lo Hago will be released as an exclusive 2xLP gatefold, CD, and as two digital EPs April 7th via Icons Creating Evil Art. Find ordering info at THIS LOCATION.
Carlos Ibarra began his career as a guitarist and songwriter in various local bands before reaching infamy and notoriety across the metal and punk scene in Europe as a guitarist/songwriter/producer of the death metal act Age Of Woe. With them, he recorded two albums and two EPs: Inhumanform (Suicide Records, 2013) and An Ill Wind Blowing (War-Anthem, 2016). He has also released music with Terrorstat, a band featuring members of Walk Through Fire and Serpent Omega as well as Wefring featuring members of The Leather Nun, Exhale, and Psycore, among others.
In 2019, after spending a year composing material, Ibarra began work on a solo record. He recorded the music in a subterranean water cistern that has been abandoned for almost one-hundred years and is located 20 meters under a small hill in Gothenburg, Sweden. This water cistern just happened to have magical natural reverbs that are up to eighteen seconds long. Working in this was a true challenge: electricity was limited, it was wet, cold, and full of rats and spiders. Not many recording engineers would do it, but Carlos Sepulveda (Psycore, Leather Nun) was up to the task. For four magical days, Sepulveda and drummer Stefan Johansson (Abrovinch, Jimmy Ågren), worked in this enchanting setting.
The following year, Ibarra went to the Thar desert in India to find the peace and serenity necessary to write the lyrics to these songs only to get stuck there during the outbreak of Covid-19. This served as a huge inspiration for the lyrics of his upcoming album: El Miedo De Amar Pero Igual Lo Hago. The record touches on the subjects of loss, heritage, and the feeling of belonging or not belonging with lyrics sung in Spanish, Polish, Arabic, Persian, and French.
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