A few years ago, only people who spent too much daytime free time on Discogs knew him. Now he’s the unofficial patron saint for yoga studios in Berlin-Kreuzberg and fitness gurus in San Francisco: Suso Sáiz, a Spanish musician with a penchant for a body of melodies. His music is the definition of nostalgia for empty shopping malls or endless hotel corridors. A sound oasis that he has allowed to blossom since the early eighties – but has only come to the attention of a wider public in recent years. The fact that Amsterdam-based label Music From Memory gave the old records from the nineties a new coat of paint since 2016 helped to put 64-year-old Suso Sáiz on the ambient map for neoclassical dreamcatchers. They will find enough material for the next 25 truffle trips in his back catalog. After all, the Spanish composer produced so many records that even convinced hobby psychonauts lose track of his output.
For years, Suso Sáiz has therefore been pushed into the corner of esoshops and incense sticks. Not completely without reason. In the early 1980s, he founded La Orquesta de las Nubes, a group of people who put colorful flowers in their hair and bobbed around on pans. Later, he sipped liana cocktail to shine with Steve Roach and Jorge Reyes at the Basic Shamanism Course. In the nineties, star dentists played this in the waiting room. Today, the kids play it at the closing of the techno party. As a result, Sáiz, who still screws around with drones, has risen to the rank of an old master of ambient exploration. Brian Eno winks through in his early experiments, as do night-watchman excursions by Stars of the Lid, sniffing sandalwood in the sunrise.
Suso Sáiz, who has resided to Madrid since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, doesn’t like to repeat himself. »His artistic evolution« is his most important asset, he says. With »Resonant Bodies« now another journey is released, where deep listening drones in all timbres replace the full body massage. For us he has selected 10 records that have shaped, improved and educated him.
Suso Saiz: In this soundtrack I discovered the music of György Ligeti and with it I understood that not only with electronic instruments can magical and wonderful textures be obtained.
Suso Saiz: One of the masters of minimalism and the relationship between electronics and the East. Hypnotic and delicious.
Suso Saiz: For me Fripp is a master and with him I discovered other ways of understanding and using the guitar.
Suso Saiz: Electronic minimalism. Deep and delicious statism. A master.
Suso Saiz: Father of ambient and above all a master in the way of understanding musical time. Music changing the dimension of time
Suso Saiz: Sylvian’s entire career seems very interesting to me and an example of an artist evolving. With »Blemish« he breaks the archetypes of how and with what materials to build a song. Wonderfully free.
