The Patagonian city of San Carlos de Bariloche is a beautiful place, lakeside and fringed by tall, snow-dusted mountains. This is where Argentinian artist Luciano Lamtzev, aka Lumtz, grew up, and where he spent two years recording Tesoros, documenting a relaxing-sounding life: lying by the water, walking through nature, listening to the sounds of the city around him. (Apparently he really doesn’t like wearing headphones.) The process was multi-faceted, yielding field recordings, notebooks filled with drawings and ideas, and, eventually, compositions. Tesoros is a gorgeous, sometimes twee record of downtempo electroacoustic sketches that highlight the mundane majesty of living in a beautiful place.
Lamtzev’s previous releases were made of similar stuff—electronics and field recordings, comforting and sometimes cute—but they were more like two-dimensional pencil drawings filled with primary colors. Tesoros brings electronic sounds into a more meticulously rendered three-dimensional world, framed by the sounds of lapping waves and distant birdsong. The LP begins with the pitter-patter of footsteps and the tentative pulse of an electronic organ. There’s a pleasant piano somewhere in there, and the effect is like walking into someone’s house: something smells delicious on the stove, soft music is playing, maybe there’s a fire going.
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Tesoros pulls between these cozy domestic episodes and more adventurous excursions. The footfalls and glitchy stuttering on “caminandoporelcostadodelarroyo_231228” are like listening to someone going for a walk, the aural equivalent of watching a video through someone’s Meta glasses. Plucked and bowed strings dance around lapping lakeside waves on “playa serena,” as guitars reverberate like reeds swaying in the wind. It’s a perfect portrait of a natural landscape—almost too perfect, like an Ansel Adams picture of a national park before it’s overrun by tourists.
The best tracks on Tesoros are those where the electronic and acoustic intertwine and the music rises above a fusion of nature sounds and noodling. “la ventana del altillo,” a collaboration with label boss Alaska Tapes, is disorienting and melty, like a developing Polaroid distorted by the summer heat. “mirada brillante,” with MAQ, has a lead that sounds like an arpeggio strung together from seashells, calling back to the environmental music of ’80s Japan as well as early ’00s artists like the Books. And on “madera,” all the humming and whirring sounds blur into a chrome-plated smear, with what sounds like vinyl crackle in the background adding an anachronistic filter, like Lamtzev dreaming up old memories that never existed.
Tesoros is restless, made up of exploratory vignettes rather than songs. It feels like a peek into the routine of an artist who brings a notebook everywhere he goes. He immortalizes that note-taking habit in one of the album’s most charming tracks, “libretas,” which starts out with simple birdsong before entering a woozy landscape of pitch-shifted chords. There are bigger, more obvious highlights, like the closer, with its reassuring, Four Tet-like chord progression and full-fledged vocal melodies from singers Lucía Masnatta and AEMIA. But the real pleasure of Tesoros is in its moments of naked expression, the feeling of fleetingly experiencing someone else’s life through their ears.
