The Lost Tapes is not a beginning, but a threshold. It manifests as a crack through which silence seeps—dense, loaded with memories that do not fully belong to us. It is a space where voice and absence brush against each other, where what was left suspended gains weight, and where every pause contains questions that do not seek answers.

This sound art installation is born from an impossible encounter: the deliberate fusion of the author’s voice with that of the protagonist of his debut novel, NO ONE TEACHES YOU HOW TO BURY A BODY. From that convergence emerges HEOOMAN—not as a character or a pseudonym, but as a state. A slight deformation of the word “human.” A minimal error. A fissure in language through which something new begins to breathe. 

Rescuing a Lost Work 

Within the universe of the novel, the protagonist created this musical work over four decades ago. Today, A. L. Ritter rescues it from oblivion and brings it into the present. In this passage between times and spaces, the work transforms: identities dissolve, giving rise to a third presence, hybrid and anonymous. It is a creation that belongs to both, and at the same time, to no one. A shared territory that neither could have conceived alone.

HEOOMAN exists precisely in this overlap. It is what remains when authorship becomes blurred, when fiction and lived experience collapse upon one another. It is not a mask, but a superposition. It is not an escape from the human, but the human exposed as process: unstable, porous, in constant negotiation with memory, technology, and loss.

Each song, each texture, functions as an echo of this fusion. Throughout the record, voices adopt shifting identities: at times we clearly recognize the author’s voice; at others, the protagonist’s emerges, as if crossing time to reclaim its place. In certain passages, both voices intertwine until they become indistinguishable, giving rise to a third voice that belongs fully to neither. It is not an amplified voice, but an open one: a liminal space where identity becomes unstable and fertile.

Voice as Threshold

Rather than relying on technology as a visible tool, the project incorporates it as a device of displacement. The songs do not fix a stable vocal identity; instead, each piece is allowed to find its own way of speaking. The voice moves, filters, and contaminates: sometimes embodying the author’s presence in the present; at others, reviving the voice of the character who composed these songs decades ago; and occasionally becoming an intermediate space where both consciousnesses coexist.

This oscillation does not aim to deceive or conceal, but to reveal. Everything responds to intention, to a conscious gesture. By allowing the songs to adopt different voices, the project exposes the fragmentary nature of memory and the impossibility of clearly separating who is speaking when time folds upon itself. Vocal identity becomes a field of emotional experimentation, where error, interference, and superposition are not failures, but necessary conditions for something true to emerge.

The double “O” in HEOOMAN does not intensify; it opens. It suggests a mouth, an eye, a void. A space through which confusion, drift, and emotion slip. The voice ceases to be a fixed point, transforming into matter in motion, capable of mutating without losing its human charge.

Cartography of Asphalt and Memory

The physical genesis of this work is nomadic. All lyrics were captured on the move, handwritten as A. L. Ritter traversed the streets of Paris, Madrid, Bilbao, and Mexico City. Between cafés, borrowed rooms, and humid mornings, the rhythm of these cities filtered into the words and the sound itself. 

Matter, Memory, and Image

Sound is treated as living matter: captured, recycled, stretched, deformed, and reassembled. Each texture, each shadow, each residue bears witness to a process in which loss opens onto a form of healing grounded in repetition and attentive presence.

But The Lost Tapes, Vol. 1 is not only literature and music: it is also photographic art. The album cover depicts the author emerging from darkness, his face still marked by a density of black that prevents him from fully opening his eyes, while light falls upon him as a promise of resurgence. In a single image, the spirit of the project is condensed: absence and presence, opacity and illumination, fall and return.

A Fragile Constellation

The songs traverse delicate thresholds of identity and renewal: questions without answers, silences that speak, emotions that resist naming. The light appears crooked, imperfect, and precisely for that reason, truer. Time loosens its grip. Ambition softens. What remains is attention.

A voice, once fragmented by time, finally finds the space where it can exist fully—not as a fixed identity, but as HEOOMAN: the human that embraces its cracks, echoes, and contaminations.

The Lost Tapes invites a slow entry into this constellation of moments where memory, body, voice, and fiction briefly coincide. It is a shared territory, a threshold where past and present meet, where voices multiply and merge, and where each listening becomes an archaeology of what persists in the echo.

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