Los Knock Knocks Procrastination

Both as a visual artist with a past in the art world (his first solo exhibition opened at
the Amigos del Arte gallery in 1995), as well as a self-taught minimal
improvisational cosmic garage rocker –see his La Banda’s (1993) and Jesus
Freaks (2004) projects-, Diego Hernández (Santiago, 1972), active public and
semi-privately in both fields since 1992, is one of the iconoclastically multifunctional
characters of the scene casually scattered around “free improv rock, electronic
and psychedelic collectives”, such as A Full Cosmic Sound, Kb Cabala,
Watchout!, or more specifically, The Psychedelic Schafferson Jetplane or False
Sir Nicholas, by way of independent DIY labels such as E.T.C.S. Records,
Cosmovisón Andina Registros, BYM, Yellow Moon and Productora Mutante,
within the more adventurous substrate of what has summarily been termed the
new Chilean psychedelic scene, which in this case may be seen as the
connection between local archival reference points of the nineteen sixties and
seventies, such as Los Jaivas, El Polen or the more extravagant moments of Los
Blops, the musical background, halfway between hardcore, conceptual prog-kraut
noise and classic rock, and an autonomous organizational outlook aimed at
practical achievements (rehearsal room or workshop home recordings, analog no-fi
immediateness, concerts and exhibitions set up among friends, and small or
outright minimal print runs of a work aesthetic and ethics equally associated to art
brut as well as to post capitalist popular mass culture, closely connected to the
cassette format rescued for home production values). Thus, DH has devoured
whatever music, cartoons and books he can get his hands on, operating handheld
cassette recorders in order to register noise and melodies privately, as well as
drawing all over his notebooks since he was a child.
As Los Knock Knocks, Diego (guitar plus a limited variety of keyboards and
effects) has published a self-titled EP, the Digital Garage Days full-length
cassette and a seven inch single with two songs taken from that tape (A Hit Is A Hit
and Crack) that came out in a fifteen copy run published by BYM, which brings us
to Procrastination (from the Latin "procrastinare", that translates into the prefix
pro, meaning “forward”, and the suffix “crastinus”, “untill next day” from “cras”,
“tomorrow”, this is, “the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished”),
his first incursion into the long playing vinyl format, and which for various reasons
spent a long time awaiting publication, is approachable as an excursion of
exotica/lounge resonances synthesized into instrumental, persistently rhythmic
passages of accentuated panoramic-expansive, almost cinematic pulses, with
Carlos Santana one minute and Lou Reed the next on an astral journey at a beach
rave with some T-1000 robots in charge of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in a
dark wave mood, in what we could consider a firm step towards unknown territory,
removed from convention and with his own well established personal coordinates.
Published by Hueso Records in a limited edition of three hundred copies.
Los Knock Knocks / Procastination