The Barcelona-based experimental ensemble La Interdimensional Discordiana was founded by the founder of Discordian Records, multi-instrumentalist, conductor and producer, Venezuela-born El Pricto (aka Andrés Rojas) as a sonic lab. El Pricto was interested in employing this ensemble for generating musical ideas through carefully controlled processes of transformation within complex formal structures, and not as another open space for spontaneous playing.
The ensemble features alto sax player Don Malfon (aka Alfonso Muñoz), tenor sax player Luis Erades, guitarist Oskar Salat (on the left channel), Israel-born guitarist Yeo Shachar (on the right channel), bassist Richi Pons, and drummer Soren Alcaraz. El Pricto composed and conducted the music, and the album was recorded (by El Pricto, who also mixed and mastered the album, and designed its cover under the alias Prictgnosis) at Soda Acústic in Barcelona in April 2026.
Radix-1a was conceptualised by El Pricto as Language-U, a system of graphic notation using an astronomical system based on the birth chart of one member of the ensemble, including El Pricto’s, that determines the principal musical parameters without prescribing specific pitches or rhythms. It is part of El Pricto’s expanding collection of graphic scores. Language-U specifies characteristics such as register, dynamics, density, articulation, periodicity, texture, interaction and processes of transformation, while leaving the concrete realisation of those characteristics to the performers. El Pricto seeks to contrast Language-U’s identity, behaviour and structural function with the spontaneous, personal language of each musician as well as the interactions taking place at any particular moment. Therefore, the score can produce different sonorities at every performance without losing its structural identity. El Pricto’s coinduction allows all musicians to contribute their own perception and vocabulary, but within a precisely organised compositional framework. The essential improvised spirit of this work is treated as a performative intelligence required to bring the composition into existence.
It is an intense work that revolves around the stimulating tension between discipline and freedom, careful attention to detail and intuitive, sonic imagination. The six musicians were asked to interpret themselves through the practical realisation of their own astrological structures. The outcome feels tangible, thorny, and physical, full of eventful frictions and sudden eruptions, and far from any cosmic, spiritual atmospheres, suggesting quite restless and challenging sonic biographies of the ensemble musicians, but maybe this is the inevitable future of musicians who choose to explore experimental music. El Pricto promises that future works in that series would use the natal charts of other musicians from Barcelona’s experimental scene.
Eyal Hareuveni
Don Malfon (alto saxophone), Luis Erades (tenor saxophone), Oskar Salat (electric guitar), Yeo Shachar (electric guitar), Richi Pons (electric bass), Soren Alcaraz (drums)
