In 2023, the CalArts centre for contemporary arts, REDCAT, exhibited Lisa Alvarado’s Pulse Meridian Foliation, a multidisciplinary work that consisted of paintings, textiles, murals, photographs and a sound installation. Pulse Meridian Foliation explored the interconnectedness of geological processes, deep time and the politics of repatriation. Images of the installation show beautifully patterned abstract pieces: double-sided, large-scale textile pieces that hang from the ceiling and startlingly bold designs painted directly onto the gallery walls. The visual aspect of Alvarado’s work owes a debt to her Mexican heritage: aesthetic vibrancy and political astuteness become inseparable.
Alongside her work as a visual artist, Alvarado is a member of avant-garde/minimalist jazz collective Natural Information Society, a fixture on the Chicago experimental music scene for a decade and a half. As part of Pulse Meridian Foliation, Alvarado employed NIS colleague Joshua Abrams to compose a score. The result is less a soundtrack to an extant artwork and more a vital component of the work itself, a genuinely collaborative exercise.
But Abrams’ composition is capable of standing on its own, and so has become this unique and strangely moving album, Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation, a single, thirty-five-minute swathe of all-enveloping, slow-moving minimalism. Originally created for four channels (the musicians are Abrams on electronics, Alvarado on harmonium, and James Sanders playing two separate violas), it has been mixed down to two, a process that seems to have emphasised the duality of the piece, and particularly the shifting and uncertain nature of that duality. In its apparent repetitiveness, it dares you to notice change, and to be a part of it. In this respect, it bears comparison to the godheads of minimalism, Reich and Riley.
But Pulse Meridian Foliation is much more than just a cerebral exercise or a kind of musical thought experiment. For just over half an hour, it tracks a semi-fluid path, advancing like cooling lava. The keyword in the title is ‘pulse’. There is a clear back-and-forth movement to the piece, a kind of dialogue, and also the implication of living processes: the slow breaths and heartbeats of an ancient organism. Within the larger pulses (or longer breaths), the instruments move with their own, quicker vibrations, raising questions about the difference between human conceptions of time and their geological or even spiritual equivalents.
Alvarado’s family history is caught up with the American policy of Mexican Repatriation, which involved the forced migration of perhaps a million people or more between 1929 and 1939. This episode looms large in the composition, the human element that forms a counterpoint to the natural processes writ large in the sweeping hums and drones. The taut, structured components serve to remind us that such political iniquities are not just a thing of the past, and that current regimes have a lot to answer for.
Perhaps all that seems like a lot to think about, but Music for Pulse Meridian Foliation encourages thinking. Abrams’ deft compositional hand leaves room for polemical reaction while ensuring his music, for all its inner tension, remains ultimately freeing. As the piece draws to its close, you begin to realise how varied – how multidimensional – it actually is. It resembles a matrix of abundant and not always predictable intersections, there to be explored, to inspire fierce thought, but also to luxuriate in or meditate on.
Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation (March 27, 2026) Drag City
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