Translating the ephemeral and serendipitous qualities of live, improvised collaboration onto a recording is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Those singular moments of intuitive interplay between performers are highly elusive and are sometimes diminished or entirely lost in the process of their reproduction. True musical improvisation—its radical newness—is arguably only fully realized in a live setting, where no remove exists between audience and performer.
 
Yet, every so often a record like Einath comes along—a testament to the possibility of conveying a palpable sense of presence in recorded formats. Released by Yann Novak’s finely curated sound-art imprint Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Einath is a living, breathing sonic documentation of the first-time collaboration between Mexico-based artists Alejandro Morse, Cian, and Eduardo Padilla that took place one pale evening atop a partially abandoned building on the outskirts of León, Mexico. A spontaneous creative chemistry seems to have evolved out of this session, as the trio sounds utterly in sync with one another and wholly immersed in the moment.
 
Across the four free-flowing electroacoustic soundscapes that make up the recording, the artists cultivate the aura of their surroundings through layered synths and abstract guitar sketches. The opening track Repentance follows the languid pace of the setting sun, its slow-burning, atmospheric drone and plangent guitar chords coalescing in a synesthetic vision of rich orange and pink hues. Dusk steadily encroaches as the album moves into the smoldering, feedback-laden Endless Keg, while the twinkling, kosmische-esque title track illuminates the darkening sky. The album closer Aura plunges into the thick of night, its noisy hums and chirrups evoking the cacophony of an insect chorus.
 
Morse, Cian and Padilla encapsulate the subtleties of their environment with such organic expressivity and lucidity that they manage to impart Einath with an immediacy rarely heard on live recordings.