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Jon Porras is a name that might still be relatively unknown to the general public and even among listeners of contemporary minimalist music. He is probably better known as a member of the duo Barn Owl, a project he started with Evan Caminiti in 2006 in San Francisco. The keenest listeners have probably not missed the releases on Thrill Jockey, both with his adventure companion and as a soloist, which have been out over the past decade.
There is a widespread school of thought that believes that high minimalist and ambient music is a genre that has faded and is destined to be recognized only as the heritage of giants like John Cage. A mention that is not made randomly, as he constitutes one of Jon Porras's points of reference, particularly for his approach to composition, which was the subject of his discussion with the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. A recorded conversation between them described art as a methodology to render the mind sober, silent, and susceptible to "divine" influences. A statement that can be understood in both religious and "secular" terms, yet always referring to a spirituality that is part of every individual. This is where the development of the album by Jon Porras originates, aligning with his solo works and expanding the microcosm with a range of compositional solutions in drone and ambient minimalism developed primarily on a Yamaha DX7.
"Voices Of The Air" thus envisions a new experimental approach; having cut the thread with the free-form shapes of Barn Owl, it unfolds as a cerebral and balanced work. Here, the emotional and evocative component constitutes a central content but does not culminate in crescendos or sudden outbursts; instead, it is achieved through extensive synthetic modulation, a sort of digital reproduction of "raga" formulas. "Voices Of The Air" is a work with a meditative, amplified nature, filling spaces as well as the spirit of the listeners, and like a kind of breath, it synchronously empties them, allowing that previously mentioned divine spirit to enter: "everything that pertains to the creative process." The same myth, according to both a religious and secular vision, of creation is repeatedly enacted before our eyes, in this sense rendering time as something inseparable from the divine.
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