(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Like his friend Steve Roach, the Mexican composer Jorge Reyes was one of the few musicians of the late 20th century to succeed in finding the right balance between high-technology tools and the canon of primitive cultures.

In Reyes’s sights are the religious rituals of South American tribes, pagan rites dating back to the pre-Hispanic era. His sacred music attempts, as much as possible, to recover the sonorities that preceded the “Latinization” of Central and South America (his ethereal flutes inspired by the Mayan and Aztec eras are particularly renowned). The instrumentation of his Mexican Music includes fossil stones and water drums...

A La Izquierda Del Colibrė marked the beginning of this exploration, through a visceral use of electronics and the assimilation of pre-Hispanic percussion.

Downplaying the electronic element and expanding the arsenal of prehispanic instruments, Comala shifted the emphasis towards "native" ritualism. The sinister, ghostly atmosphere of the 12-minute Comala is built by a jungle of objects and voices that work their way through a lattice of electronic drones. Water and other found sounds vibrate inside the belly of Nadie Se Libra, a nightmarish vision of the otherworld. Everything collides in the tragic atmosphere of El Anima Sola, that blends vocal samples, solemn electronics, martial drums and a mournful ocarina.

Over the spectral instrumental textures of Nierika there unfolds also a guttural style of chanting (similar to that experimented with by David Hykes). The result is often akin to Jon Hassell’s abstract world-music, as in El Contador De Historia, but with an almost epic sense of the passage of time and the vastness of the world. Far from being pure mystical ecstasy, Reyes’s music is a synthesis of chronicle and photography, transfigured by the visions of a shaman. The squeal of the flute over the funereal rumble of the choir in El Vuelo De Los Ninos Pajaro, the hypnotic polyrhythmic drive of Danza De Los Peyoteros, and the intertwined mantra-like drones of El Rostro De Los Abuelos lean toward a metaphysical trance that is nevertheless firmly rooted in the origins of rural civilization.

Percussion—those more earthly and onomatopoeic sounds—take over in the concerts of small, sympathetic noises such as Venado De Cinco Puntas and Tejido De Suenos.

This progression toward a more refined and evocative sound reaches an initial milestone with the sixteen-minute suite Tente En El Aire, on Cronica De Castas, performed shoulder to shoulder with Spanish guitarist Suso Saiz. In that hypnotic flow of mysterious sounds, torn apart by sudden electric jolts and crowned by a gently rising mantra-like chant, Reyes lays out his musical aesthetic, at once metaphysical and ascetic. The neurosis that had remained subdued in the suite instead explodes in Ahė O Hay Te Estas, as if a tornado had lifted all his sonic debris into a gigantic whirlwind.

Reyes later moved ever closer to fanatically religious atmospheres, from the feverish La Danza De La Culebra to the frenzied Invocation (both on Bajo El Sol Jaguar), reaching peaks of asceticism in Omeyocan and Medicine Song (on El Costumbre).

Flayed God collects incidental music for television and theater.

Reyes (as well as Saiz) also plays in Steve Roach’s Suspended Memories.

Jorge Reyes died in 2009 at the age of 58.