BALTHVS - Transmutations

“Transmutations”, the fifth album by BALTHVS, is a strange, hybrid creature: not a record of new material, not a live album, but an attempt to capture on record the experience accumulated over years of touring and improvisation. Recorded during the European tour in late 2025 and the “Flesh And Soul” tour, it was then reassembled in the studio between San Diego and Bogotá. So what can it be? Perhaps the attempt to capture the band's onstage energy and “alchemize” it into something new. It's no coincidence that the band themselves have spoken explicitly of “transmuting” the concert into an album, replacing and re-recording certain elements to achieve studio-level quality without losing the warmth of the live performances.

Over the years Balthvs had worked on their music mostly within a domestic setting; in “Transmutations” you can feel the forward leap of a band that now lives on stage, with over a hundred shows in twenty-six countries and a status of real standing within Latin American alternative jazz. Here the songs come back to life in expanded arrangements, where thicker rhythm sections and atmospheres close to space rock underpin Balthazar Aguirre's guitar lines.

The album's hybrid nature lies not only in the tour recording and studio reassembly, but also in the presence of a handful of previously unreleased tracks: from the nervy “LSD In Bahia”, which recalls something of the atmospheres of La LOM, to the murky “Outer Reaches”, from the groove of “Shakedown Street” (with Aguirre on vocals) to “Inner Heights”, which continues it and confirms the production's live-wire grip.

The other songs, the “alchemized” ones, are reworkings of more recent material (last year's EP, “Mood Swing”) or of the earlier album “Harvest”.

The very structure of “Transmutations” insists on the relationship between the earlier repertoire and the unreleased tracks. “All Is One” generates “Outer Reaches”, a percussive suite that pushes its tribal vein to the brink of trance, driven by Santiago's drumming and a guitar that favours circular phrasing over solo fireworks. “Ojos Verdes” is literally refracted into “LSD in Bahia”, where Brazilian rhythms are filtered through the trio's familiar psych-funk prism.

“Transmutations”, then, is not just a new chapter in the band's discography and an experiment straddling live album, post-production and new material: it's also a manifesto for the group, whose creative freedom lies not only in the diverse influences with which they make their music, but also in the hybridization of the different moments that make up their musical discourse. A work absolutely not to be underestimated, but to be discovered and listened to.

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12/04/2026