Vee Hua 華婷婷
Photo Credit: James Bianchi and Qu Metcalf
Physics, Algorithms & Deep Listening
Fundamentally, Cortez is more than just a musician and producer; they’re also a sound designer, installation artist, and occasional teacher and educator — and all of this shows up in various aspects of Erospace. From its beautifully-photographed album cover to the zine of poetry and writings that accompanies it, Erospace is a fully-formed reflection on love.
“I was really obsessed with the physics of sound, especially because at the time I was teaching classes about this stuff…” Cortez reflects. They note that they were especially inspired by how animals and human beings with impaired vision can echo-locate, as well as the spectrums of hearing that lie far outside of average human capacity.
“I started to have my mind blown by all of the ways that sound is underlying our lives,” says Cortez. “[It] is really magical for me to think about… there’s all these parts of the world that we don’t get to experience that others do.”
In that same period, Cortez found themselves getting extremely obsessed with a couple other large ideas that would all eventually weave together to form Erospace. One was an algorithm called the Fourier Transform — a really old math equation which they describe as “really nerdy stuff, where you can take any sound with this algorithm and you can separate it down into its individual particles, any sound, and then you can put it back together as well.”
Also influential were deep listening practices inspired by American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, which encouraged Cortez to undertake meditations that helped them expand their listening out further and further.
“[The meditations] started to make me… really viscerally feel the way that sound was permeating my body — passing through me, changing my insides, moving away, and then going through another body, [whether] human or other…” Cortez recalls. “I just started to imagine the atmosphere full of waves passing through everything, connecting and modulating everything.”
The concept of all things being connected — whether through the physics of sound, the building blocks of all things, or the waves that pass throughout the universe — helped form the initial base of Erospace. Often, it is from these such semi-blurry yet scientific states that Cortez builds their projects and eventually finds clarity.
“Later, ‘erospace’ just dropped into my mind as an important word, and I was like, ‘This is important. That’s the name of the album. I don’t know why yet, but I need to fulfill this,'” they recall. “As I kept going.. I was questioning, ‘Why erospace? What do I even think love is? Why is this word coming to me?'”
Eventually, it all came together — where the environment of sound became interwoven with the feeling-states of love.
“It catapulted into my understanding of Erospace, which doesn’t have to have sound as the medium that we see those tethers through, but love is kind of where I landed,” says Cortez. “When I started to see that and feel it kind of on a regular basis, I felt more, I guess, not separate from everything around me.”
Photo Credit: James Bianchi and Qu Metcalf
Connections to Love & Spirit
Becoming aware of all that is around them led Cortez to feeling more of a responsibility around how they projected their waves out into the world. Many of their investigations behind Erospace relied on musings about love written by notable thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldua, and bell hooks.
“I did a lot of research into the philosophy of love from a bunch of perspectives, and one of the main things that kept coming up in lots of different philosophies of love is that… love is the first time that you encounter a mirror of yourself from another person that you really care about,” they say. “You get this reflection of yourself that you critically look at, because you love this person and you want to be seen in the best light, and it kind of forces you to reconsider yourself… or just think about yourself critically.”
“What I’ve come to [as] the definition of love… is this force that shows us ourselves through our relations and proves that we’re not a singular entity,” they continue.
This perspective also ties in with Cortez’s spiritual practice. Their spirituality may not be overtly stated on the record, but Cortez nonetheless describes it as “the strongest part” of their creative process.
“All of the science, all of the tech… I’m fascinated by these things, but tech specifically is a means to an end. I don’t glorify that,” says Cortez. “To me, the most important part of the process is that spiritual connection… having the tunnel open to receive even a word that you’re like, ‘What? Well, this feels important. I need to follow it…'”
While the spiritual process may have encouraged Cortez to investigate a seemingly vague word like Erospace, it requires a back-and-forth between following their intellect and their intuition to finally reach what feels like an end product.
“Aside from all of the intellectual rabbit holes that I’ll go down trying to figure that out,” they say, regarding when they receive a message about a word or a concept to explore, “it’s always paired with a daily spiritual practice, too… I’m asking all realms that are outside of myself that I don’t know enough yet for answers.”
Integral in their process is much ancestor and altar work, as well as deep listening meditations. They describe their “spiritual core” as “earth-based,” though it is all rooted in a hodge-podge of their own formation, due to inheriting a multitude of disparate spiritual beliefs from their family.
Written by Crystal Quartez; designed and illustrated by Carina Tort; Erospace logo by Mugwert
Words & Reflections
Erospace includes many “firsts” for Cortez. They self-describe it as their most “pop” album — with identifiable song structures and numerous tracks on which they lend their vocals for the first time — but it also comes with a zine that includes writing that they previously may not have felt too timid to share publicly.
“For this project, I did way more writing than for any other project I’ve done before,” Cortez explains, “When I was reading those back, I was starting to feel like, ‘Man, I feel like these are angles of this concept, but I don’t think people are going to get unless I give it to them.'”
Drawing on their two most significant writing practices — personal journals and academic writing — the zine is an amalgam of ideas that they’ve gathered across three years of “diligently researching the concept.” After they gained the self-confidence that their writings were worth sharing, Cortez went through multiple years of journal entries and pulled together a collection of journal entries, poetry, lists of inspiration, and other tidbits.
One zine fragment reads, “I alter this space, this space is my altar,” while another notes, “The universe is winking at you.” The first seems to pay homage to the artist’s personal altar practice, while the latter hints at how they converse with the universe, and how the universe often gives them synchronicities and other bits of treasure to unearth.
“I try to remind myself that the way that we live our daily lives is — especially in organized society — a set of decisions that we probably didn’t even make,” Cortez explains. “Those are not laws of nature; those are decisions that we have been handed, and we have the ability to make other decisions.”
“My way of practicing is making those decisions that fall against what I’ve been taught, and then trying to notice what happens from that,” they continue. “And I have seen — through doing that for a long time — not massive global changes… little changes in my own life or in my surroundings.
“I do believe it’s powerful to think that things can change,” they continue, “and to practice that, even on a micro level, in your own life.”
With a record like Erospace — which thinks and dreams of love and connection in a time when so much feels fragmented and disconnected — perhaps Cortez’s reflections hold hope and possibility. Though Cortez would prefer that listeners have their own experiences and interpretations of the record, they do have their own intentions for Erospace.
“I hope it can be a sonic space that [listeners] can come to, to feel into the ways that maybe we’ve been fragmented from each other… the forces of the universe, [and] other beings,” they conclude. “Just remember that we’re not so fragmented as we’re told.”
Crystal Quartez – Erospace Album Stream
Written, Produced and Mixed by Crystal Quartez
Mastered by Jason Powers
Photography by James Bianchi
Art Direction & Guest Vocals by Qu Metcalf
Vinyl Type & Layout by Mugwert
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