Forty eight years later, the man who made it wrote back the same afternoon

There is almost nothing online about Tal Vez, so I tracked down Ricardo Dal Farra and asked him myself. He wrote back and started telling me things that are nowhere online.

He was twenty when he made it, not twenty one as the dealers list it. Studying counterpoint, harmony and composition, deep into jazz rock at the same time, working as a session musician programming synthesizers "when almost nobody in Argentina had any idea how to do that."

Which is how Chick Corea ended up on his gear. In his words, Corea "used my Minimoog synth for several hours in a jazz bar after his big concert in Buenos Aires." He was the kid with the machine. That is why everyone called.

December 1978, he gets Domingo Cura, Antonio Agri, Daniel Melingo, Miguel Zavaleta and half the musicians in the city onto one record. He also told me some of them appear on the sleeve under different names, because of contract restrictions. The credits on this jacket are partly fiction.

The best part of his email, though, was the signature at the bottom. BFA in music. PhD in arts. Postdoc in art and science. Professor of music at Concordia in Montreal. Director of a research centre in electronic arts in Buenos Aires. A visiting chair in Bogota called Arte y Clima. Art and climate.

That is not a musician. That is a polymath. Part composer, part scientist, part archivist.

He spent roughly thirty years, his number, gathering the Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection. Over seventeen hundred recordings, hundreds of composers, pieces that existed on one reel in one apartment and would simply have stopped existing. Nobody asked him to do it. There is no money in it. He decided music should not vanish.

From lending Corea a Minimoog at twenty to working on art and the climate crisis now.

This is the part of collecting nobody tells you about. Sometimes you go looking and the person who made the thing in your hands writes back the same afternoon, forty eight years later, still building.

Thank you Ricardo.