Una ofrenda a la ausencia (an offering to absence in Spanish) is already the fourth solo album in four years of Argentinian, prolific and globe-trotting tenor sax player and poet Camila Nebbia. Her first solo album De Este Lado (from this side) introduced her experimental solo aesthetics – solo sax improvisations with spoken word poetry and pedal effects. Una ofrenda a la ausencia was recorded at Doctor F studio in Nebbia’s hometown, Buenos Aires, in December 2022.

The multidisciplinary Nebbia, who is based now in Berlin, studied classical saxophone, jazz, film direction and contemporary performance and composition at academies in Argentina, Estonia and Sweden. She layers her artistic practice through the creation and destruction of archival memory. Una ofrenda a la ausencia explores the rawness, harshness and roughness of sound embracing the intense and unfiltered expressions that emerge from absence.

The album features 16 short improvisations that allow Nebbia to explore and expand her sax vocabulary with extended breathing techniques and effects. She sketches brief melodies, investigates raw and rough sounds and alternates between caressing emotions to ethereal drones and delicate and some unsettling sonic experiments, all are sonic meditations on the issue of absence and void. Nebbia reads one poem «Sobre la función del olvido» (On the function of forgetting) but the music and all titles refer to and reflect the transient essence of all experiences, non-attachment and disappearing into a noisy void, or as one piece is titled «Estar y desaparecer, desaparecer y estar» (Be and disappear, disappear and be).

Una ofrenda a la ausencia suggests a unique, contemplative and immersive listening experience.

Eyal Hareuveni 

Camila Nebbia (tenor saxophone, spoken word, effects)