Ale Hop is the moniker of Alejandra Cárdenas, a Berlin-based, Peru-born artist, researcher, and experimental multi-instrumentalist that began her career in the 2000s in the underground scene of Lima, where she had several pop, punk and electronic bands, and continually collaborated with filmmakers, musicians, and artists. In her solo music project, she finely blends and crafts a complex repertoire of unorthodox guitar techniques, with psychedelic drones that become visceral and breathtaking live performances. Her studious approach to the subjects covered in her albums and pieces is constantly influenced by her background as a researcher. Cárdenas completed a BA in Art History, her master's in Sound Studies, further studies in History of Science and Technology, and is currently a doctoral candidate at Berlin University of Arts. She has edited two volumes of the publication Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal on decolonial, non-western, and Latin American perspectives on sound and listening, and is co-curator of the Berlin-based festival Radical Sounds Latin America.
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KR 087LP
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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 (BR 127LP, 2019) -- or scientific magnification of invisible worlds -- The Life of Insects (BR 141LP, 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. The release of Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City? is accompanied by a 50-minute audiovisual installation that will premiere at CTM 2022 Exhibition in January, which was created in collaboration with the Mexican technologist and artist Moises Horta. 180 gram vinyl; gatefold sleeve; includes download card.
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BR 141LP
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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. 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, 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. Edition of 300.
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BR 127LP
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Apophenia by Ale Hop, suggests possible and reimagined South American geographies. Along with atomized field recordings and sound samples she recollected from video archives from her homeland, Peru, the composer interweaves unknown territories by mimicking mountains and oceans, but also grey skies and violent cities, with droning and shrieking textures of electric guitars mixed with spoken chatters and sizzles. The LP is accompanied by two black-and-white images from the Peruvian photographer Gihan Tubbeh that withhold the same poetic nature of the music through visual rhymes expressed on fragments of landscapes.
Ale Hop is a Berlin-based artist, researcher, and experimental instrumentalist from Peru. She composes electronic 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 that she uses as her sound vocabulary to craft a performance of astonishing physical intensity, saturated of layers of distortion and stunning atmospheres. Additionally, in her current A/V performance, Ale Hop assembles soundscapes that are related to the contradictory memories she keeps from Peru, from the violence and turbulence that she grew up, in uncertain times in Lima, through contemplative territories.
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