There is a scene toward the end of this story where a cat walks over forgotten boxes in an attic, knocking a handful of cassette tapes to the floor.

On each one, handwritten, it reads: "Alex's Demos, 70´s / 80´s band." No one had touched them in years. No one knew—not even the character himself—that they were still there, waiting.

The Lost Tapes is born from this exact image. Not as a metaphor, but as a real starting point: what if those tapes actually existed? What would they sound like if someone, decades later, decided to listen to them—and not just listen to them, but sing them?

Alex is the protagonist of INERTE (No One Teaches You How to Bury a Body), a man who spends the entire novel trying to bury something that refuses to stay underground. His dead wife speaks to him, accompanies him, and even possesses him through other people. It is a story about what we do with the things we can't let go of, about how guilt always finds a crack through which to breathe again.

A Multidisciplinary Art Installation

This record carries on that question, but off the page. Heooman is not just a musical album, but a conceptual art installation that expands the universe of the novel. A. L. Ritter has taken entire passages from his work and translated them into the realm of sound.

Each and every lyric on the album was written entirely by the author, 100% based on the narrative, psychology, and atmosphere of INERTE. There are no algorithms in the message: the words and emotional intent belong entirely to Ritter's pen.

However, bringing this project to life does not come from a traditional recording studio, but from pure artistic resilience: it is the result of creating with limited resources and tapping into cutting-edge technology to break down those physical barriers.

Author's Note on the Technical and Digital Process: The use of artificial intelligence plays an active role in the creation of The Lost Tapes, acting as a co-pilot in the sound lab. Its application was fundamental in terms of audio engineering, specifically utilized in areas such as instrument integration, mixing, equalization, and the final mastering of the songs.

As for the vocals, they were crafted in an artisanal and conceptual way to emulate Alex's identity: a digital symbiosis that processes and fuses the author's actual voice with those of guest artists. This is where technology helped polish and tie together the sonic environment where these tracks come alive.

The result does not belong entirely to either of them. It is not the author disguised as the character, nor the character speaking through the mouth of his creator. It is something that only exists at the exact intersection where both overlap. That is what we call HEOOMAN: an almost-human word, with a deliberate error in the middle, like a fissure through which another voice slips in.

The Aesthetics of Memory

Listening to the album is similar to what happens to Alex throughout the novel: you are never entirely sure who you are talking to. There are songs where the voice sounds recognizably present, current, like someone singing today. There are others where it seems to come from further back, from a man who never thought anyone would unearth what he wrote.

And there are moments—the most unsettling ones—where you can no longer tell one from the other. This is not a production oversight, nor is it meant to simulate the artificial polish of the mainstream music industry. It is, perhaps, the only honest thing that could be done with this material and with today's tools: letting memory sound exactly as it does in reality—mixed, contaminated, artisanal, and alive despite everything.

The lyrics were written while walking, in cafés and borrowed rooms in Paris, Madrid, Bilbao, and Mexico City, in notebooks that absorbed the noise of each city just as Alex unwittingly absorbs the presence of everything he cannot manage to bury. The cover art shows the author emerging from a darkness that hasn't quite let go of him yet, with a light falling on him more as a question than an answer.

You don't need to have read the novel to get into this record. But those who have will recognize something beneath every song: the weight of what goes unsaid, the habit of talking to someone who is no longer there, the way the past—no matter how much dirt you throw over it—always finds a way back to the surface.