Cycles of Disappearance is the debut full-length solo album by Spanish-Cuban composer, guitarist, and producer Emil Saiz, based between Porto and Madrid. Saiz released a solo EP, Affect/Reflect (Self-Released, 2024). Cycles of Disappearance is also the debut album of the newly founded Swedish label Ruby Harvest.

The five ambient soundscapes originated from manipulated, effects-laden electric guitar improvisations, carefully drawn out, then composed and recorded during the musician’s pilgrimage down the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula in a single take with minimal edits, and no post-production. Saiz calls these soundscapes «an exploration of the relationship between sound and mind through the medium of the electric guitar, an inquiry into the creative act as a catalyst for inner transformation».  Saiz thinks of sound as a sensual, elastic entity to be felt. «The body is a field of resonant membranes, an instrument—not just a receiver, but a resonator. Sound, a tool for reshaping the inner landscape».

These atmospheric, slow-shifting, and unhurried soundscapes attempt to mirror a constant state of flux, a state of transformation and regeneration, of movement between states, even if it occurs only on a cellular level, but always in its primal, intuitive, visceral, and openly emotional form. These soundscapes blur the listener’s sense of time and space, but as soon as Saiz exhausts their potential as suggestive clouds of sound, all disintegrate into a bonfire of embers, as the deconstruction of an idea appears to be just as essential as the initial idea itself.

Eyal Hareuveni

Emil Saiz (electric guitar)