FORMIKA
Mexican composer Felipe Pérez Santiago introduces the follow up to his 2013 album, Mantis with his first Navona release, FORMIKA, an album of chamber music. Pérez Santiago continues his series with a vast notational layering and timing propelled by traditional instrumentation. Masterful playing by choice ensembles like Tamayo and Onix, create a particularly kaleidoscopic nostalgia in this pitching album.
With FORMIKA, the arrangements become not only the thruways to higher and lower planes of intimacy, but they shift in tonality and range with ecstatic energy and texture. This is intensely felt in the panoramic and awakening Hospital Suite — written with the help of a grant by the National Fund for Culture and Arts, Mexico during the hours while the composer watched over two loved ones convalescent in a hospital.
Just as the staircases in a home can lead up into the nestled warmth of a room or down into the dark basement at twilight, FORMIKA leads us, in steps and gravity, to those tender and rough realms of memory.