Again, a name that has crossed this path many times on Pax, Public Eyesore and many more usually as part of a duo, group or collection, now emerges with a solo album. And I must admit it is one of those strange hard-to-review beasts.
There are 30 tracks on the album, of which 20 are around three minutes and the rest about 1. There are only 8 with titles, and they fall into the longer category. On listening you realise what is distinct about them is that they have vocals – softly mumble-sung poems. The list of instruments is extensive, though guitar, piano and field recordings tend to be the most used.
If we consider the first sequence there is a whooshing scrabbly recording which could be in a tunnel, the first song over scribbling scrape bangs and rattles that sound like the inside of a piano, a rumbling cycle, more string improv (either guitar or piano) and then another song over strummed guitar.
The album continues in this way. There are short experiments with sound sources, some of which are identifiable and some not – a crackling futz, scraping high tone violin, various field recordings, voice going ahhaahhhaaa, strumming, drilling buzz with radio sounds, blown and tapped didgeridoo. Indeed there are notes at the Pax site indicating the source of each – I had got most, though the rattling in 12 was 'goatnails', the crackle futz in 7 was a jackplug, the strange metallic noises were a zither rod and so on. The solo accordion was lost in the 'microscopic recording' which turned it into a crackling pebble drop! While it is not a 'mystery sound' album, reading the sources does make sense of some things – though I can see why you would leave the information off the cover.
Then there are the longer tracks – two are extended site recordings with the goatnails. The songs (again lyrics are on site for some) are accompanied by varied ensembles – and the album is balanced here. The first two and last two have solo instruments – piano or guitar); third and sixth are over site recordings which move in and out of focus, include cars and birds, singing and talking. And the central two are multitracked – they have relatively complex combinations of crackling and sampled turntables, bells cymbals and drums, bowed deep toned from the bass – standing out quite distinctly.
What that leaves you with is a collection of mainly 'unformed' pieces – moments that Diaz-Infante has captured while bowing the body of his guitar, riding an SF MUNI bus, preparing a piano or fiddling with a jack. The selection and contraction of them then becomes a window onto a larger piece – we can imagine the minutes or hours on either side. Some have then been extended as the basis for the poem-songs but, other than the multitracked ones, the longer pieces are not preferenced.
The listening experience is comparable to looking through an artists sketch book, where images are complete yet in various stages of completion, and we have the immediate enjoyment in addition to the imagination of possibilities. And if an extended improv track/album asks us to consider the moment of its creation, here we have an extended series of moments – and while the length suggests they are ripe for random-play, they feel and look like they have been carefully placed.
In many ways this structure makes the album more approachable, as does the relaxed and restrained tone, without losing the immediacy and thought-provocation of the genre. One which I am sure will continue to reveal aspects over time.
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Diaz-Infante adds two more releases to his corpus that gets infinite 
proportions. His output is spread out on numerous labels like 
Bottomfeeder, Evolving Ear, InstrumenTales, oTo,
pfMENTUM, Public Eyesore, Staalplaat, Seagull, Sweet Stuff Media, and 
Zzaj. These two new releases are on his own Pax Recordings.
The solo one is the special one here. With accordion, acoustic 
guitar, Chinese hand exercise balls, didgeridoo, drums, electric bass 
guitar, field recordings, goatnails, mbira, piano, radio, singing 
bowls, turntalbe, violin, vocals and zither rod, Diaz-Infante creates 
his own intimate and peacefull little universe.
Murmuring day-dreamer Diaz sings his simple songs like somebody who 
in a lost moment sings and plays for himself, thinking nobody is the 
neighbourhood. Very relaxed music, not disturbed by the hectic world.
Because Diaz-Infante uses many different instruments and objects we 
enjoy a varied sonic panorama. We hear environmental sounds, loops, 
instruments out of tune, etc.
The result is a very personal music. Maybe that's why the cd has no 
title. Ernesto Diaz-Infate says it all. It's some of the most 
beautiful I've heard from Diaz-Infante.
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Ernesto Diaz-Infante is a prolific experimental composer based in California. He has released numerous recordings of his works since the 1990s, but has never been more "out there" than he is here. His latest self-titled release has Diaz-Infante appearing as a veritable one-man band, playing a host of acoustic and electric instruments, and collecting "field recordings" as well.

Most of the compositions here (of which there are 30) are brief episodes, the longest running no more than three and a quarter minutes. While the sixteen instruments listed in the notes as appearing on the recording would seem to indicate a mass of sound, most of these pieces are subtle, the variety of instruments employed as different splashes of color deployed throughout. The dominant texture is often Diaz-Infante's voice; he delivers vocals in a hushed basso whisper, sprechstimme-like in its vacillation between pitch and speech. The instrumental compositions focus as much on non-pitched terrain as pitches, employing copious sound effects and percussion.

As such, the 52-minute CD seems like a suite of short, related movements that coalesce into a whole -- which, while not overwhelming in the thrust of its narrative, is filled with a complex architecture of sonic structures.
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On this disc, Ernesto unveils his sensitive singer-songwriter side in between long streches of weirdness. A pattern develops early on in the sequencing of the 30 tracks on this disc: he presents two to four short, avant samples of anti-structure and power-electronic sounds (whose titles are simply the track lengths), then follows with an actual song (minimalist as it may be; these compositions are the ones important enough to actually rate titles), with the result that eight actual songs are scattered across the disc, islands in a sea of wordless exercises in sound and experimental stylings. Some of those exercises are quite interesting indeed: track 12 (3:13) sounds like it's all field-recording drone, hypnotizing even with next to nothing going on, darkwave without the waves. The "songs" are a bit closer to recognizable tunes (well, sorta), with vaguely-discernable structures mostly swaddled in drone and accompanied by strange rhythms and sounds as Ernesto sings (sounding bizarrely like a cross between Tom Waits 'n Todd Trainer -- takes a bit of getting used to). What he's singing about i have no idea, but with song titles like "from Henry who just wrote," "cranking up its pathos," and "a ride to Cuba with Martin Sheen," i suspect it's fairly elliptical and opaque. With this solo disc Ernesto proves once again to be a tone scientist of the highest order, branching out in unexpected directions, working with unusual sounds, integrating electronics and acoustic instruments into his soundscapes and songs. He also has swell taste in hats. I'm not convinced this would be a good place to start if you haven't already grokked Ernesto's mighty (and mighty eccentric) anti-guitar mojo, but if you're already down with his deep-dish experimental groove, then you'll want to scope this out.
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