Hello there. And welcome to my newsletter! If you’re getting this email I was thinking of you, and thought it might be nice to keep in touch.

Moraines are both accumulation and deposit, a churning terrestrial agglomeration laid down at glacial speed. I’ve started this newsletter as my “moraine,” a way to put things down for you to see, read, and hear. I’ll share show announcements, audio releases, perhaps a story or two—things like that. I am horrific at texting and I dislike invasive social media platforms, so I have landed on this as a fine way to keep in touch with you, dear friends, colleagues, and listeners. I promise these dispatches will be occasional, at most, and if you want to unsubscribe, please just click here: unsubscribe. I won’t be offended! If you do want to subscribe, but I’ve got the wrong email in my rolodex, you can also re-subscribe using your correct address.

OK! On to more pressing matters.

I’ve been working on some sound projects for a while now, uncertain about the best way to share them. This lead me to start El Gallo de Oro, a small record label to make a home for these projects in the form of limited-edition records, CDs, and other printed matter. I’m not exactly sure what the scope and tenor of El Gallo de Oro will be, but I’m excited to see what it can hold.

I’ve borrowed the name from my grandparents’ jewellery store in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which they opened in 1963 and ran together until 2010. I’m conceiving this new iteration of El Gallo De Oro as a continuation of their work. Here’s a photo of Calle Fortaleza, where their store was located, in the 1960s. It looks largely the same today—traffic and all.

Our first release will be The Americanization of Shmuel, a full-length record by yours truly. This music has been basically finished for a few years now; the missing piece was the B-Side, which Ella Heron and I made together this past winter. The record has been beautifully mastered by Sean McCann; Tyler at Audio Geography is lathe cutting it to vinyl as we speak! The vinyl will be a very limited artist edition of 25, each within a hand-painted sleeve. The CD is a run of 100 in professional Digipaks. Both physical editions come with a secret 11×17 color poster.

These will ship around 7/25/2025, and the digital record can be had TODAY! Listen and purchase by emailing me eli@elgallodeoro.net or visiting elgallo.bandcamp.com.

Here are notes from the press release:

“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

-Walter Benjamin, 1940

The Americanization of Shmuel is a polyphonic, multilingual map of songs, places, movements, and assimilation. There are recorded fragments, flotsam and debris left in the angel of history‘s turbid wake. And then there is the noise, an implacable wind, an inverted floor, the tide, a valley, snow, sleep–and always a screen, which both masks and becomes a surface of projection. The wind ebbs and flows, eroding syllables and dividing each side of the record into 18 parts – numerologically the Hebrew word חי or "life", made up of the letters Chet (ח) and Yud (י). The theme common to both sides is how private cultures of transmission–lullaby, prayer–resist nationalistic monopolies on space, narrative, and history.

There are three narratives that weave through the A-side of the record. The first concerns an intergenerational family. They sing and listen together, trying to remember lullabies. Some of these songs have been reproduced through generations of singing, some of them are lost, or teetering on the edge of memory. They sing and speak a variety of languages – Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, English, Arabic, Hebrew. In the second narrative a piano melody undergoes transformations and permutations. The melody was arranged and popularized by Jazz pianist Bill Evans, but originally written for the 1964 anti-war comedy “The Americanization of Emily.” These recordings are made in an artist’s studio, where you can hear the artist manipulating a computer that processes and “mis-remembers” the melody using a simple markov chain patch. The third narrative is voiced by an old man, the titular “Shmuel" or Sam. He speaks English with a thick accent and recollects moments in his life from before and after World War II. In 1944, he and his family were deported from the Carpathian mountains to the concentration camp Auschwitz. Only Sam and one brother managed to escape in 1945. After being mistakenly taken as prisoners of war by the Soviet army they returned to their village in the mountains, which was unrecognizable, and then smuggled themselves into mandatory Palestine via Britain’s Jewish Brigade, before eventually immigrating to Barranquilla, Colombia, then to Newark, New Jersey, and finally to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he has lived most of his life in diaspora and where he raised his three daughters, one of which is the artist’s mother.

The B-side But a storm is blowing from Paradise is saxophonist Ella Heron’s melodic response to the embedded histories of the A side. It is a prayer to the Angel of History recorded in wind and metal.

In July, I’ll be hosting a release party/concert here in Providence, so keep an eye out for that. Otherwise — I hope you’re doing ALRIGHT out in the world, and do let me know when you are in Rhode Island 🦪.

Warm regards,
Eli