By Phillipe Roberts
Making a grand entrance with elemental synths blasting, Mexico City’s Ana López Reyes illustrates the surreal reality of cultural erasure with brutal clarity on her latest single “Calles,” imagining a post-apocalyptic transformation that allows the suppressed past to resurface. Rattling with constantly shifting, fever-dream percussion and organized bursts of overdriven noise, Reyes’ newest experiment as Nnux, accompanied by beautifully futuristic video directed by visual artist Martha Maya (LVSTVCRV) and 3D by Intton Godelg, implodes oppressive futures by wreaking havoc on the present.
“Calles” emerged from a visit to El Templo Mayor in Mexico City, where pre-Spanish Aztec architecture still visible among the constructs it was never meant to survive brought the song’s core concepts to life. “I wrote about a ‘city made of water’ buried underneath the current city, because the ancient city had canals instead of streets, it was all water,” Reyes explains. “I wrote this song about a city on top of another city, which for me is a symbol of domination of a culture on top of the other. I wrote lyrics talking about how the fallen gods and the wounded temples are hiding beneath everything we see in the city, as a symbol of how oppression is present at all times.”
Nnux’s life-giving synthesizer and ecstatic vocal sampling-work, paired with the elongated harmonized crooning of her voice, lift that curtain with a bold palette of sounds that never settles into a mechanized pattern. The elements swim and drift within and around each other with a stunningly organic quality. There’s a distinct sense of almost breaking through to that tantalizing future that’s never quite satisfied, highlighting the post-apocalyptic yearning that Reyes so adeptly invokes. Combined with Martha’s meticulous and psychedelic visual mutations, Mexico City’s indigenous past springs to life with revolutionary lucidity. “When Martha and I started working on the video, she told me she was imagining that the song was talking not only about the ancient city, but the current city being eaten up by water in the future,” Reyes says, ”like seeing the symbols of our current city from a future where the city doesn’t exist anymore, or at least is not how we know it now.” Indeed, as the Google Maps image of the city spins and distorts, flooding the city with shimmering 3D water and ghostly projections of temples, vegetation, and towers of glimmering psychic energy, their shared lucid dream offers a glimpse of apocalyptic justice that strikes to the core.
Nnux’s debut album, Ciudad, is out now via Mexico City’s VAA.