In December of 1981, high in the mountains of El Salvador, in a little town called El Mozote, a whole town was destroyed by the most elite battalion of the Salvadorean army. They left nobody alive, not even the children. This event was kept secret for many years, denied by the right wing government of El Salvador and by the U.S. Government as well. As the years passed by, the evidence accumulated and eventually the mass graves were uncovered.

In January of 1995, I was asked to write some kind of music that would describe those forces. The result was a 45 minute long electroacoustic piece that aims at going beyond the statistics and the rhetoric towards a fuller understanding (mental, emotional and physical) of what happened at El Mozote. In the piece, samples and electronic sounds combine with acoustic guitars and newscasts from the war, all collaborating to take the listener in a journey from the safety of the present to a forgotten moment in recent history when the deepest and darkest forces of the human heart were unleashed.

My musical influences range from the Orb, Aphex Twin, Bill Laswell, Hearts of Space, FSOL and DJ Spooky to composers such as Stockhausen, Debussy, John Cage and Philip Glass.

Listen to a fragment from the piece as a streaming MP3!(

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Or send a check or money order for $12 to:

Juan Carlos Mendizabal
P.O. BOX 3251
Daly City, CA 94015-3251

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