Heart Thread is the first electroacoustic album released by the composer and educator Mario Diaz de Leon as himself, unaccompanied by a band of collaborators or the superfluous ego shield of a pen name. On it, Mario presents the listener with no more than two separate songs, "Heart Thread I" and "Heart Thread II," performed on synthesizers, woodwind timbres, and backed by electronic percussion. The songs adhere to typical pop music structures, which would seem unremarkable, except for the fact that each track is more than twenty minutes long. Mario is in no hurry to reach any kind of climax or resolve any predicted pattern, instead he allows the exaggerated length of the tracks to serve as an integration of abundance and religious myth-making. Pop music typically thrives on brevity and an embrace of a kind of scarcity, but Mario untethers his compositions on Heart Thread from the privations that would otherwise limit their expansion- allowing them to approach the infinite in a natural revelation of form. This deliberate protraction and grasp for the indefinite in acceptance of a boundless wealth of space further anticipates an encounter with the divine. By making space for the infinite mystery of the cosmoses, the album invites a conversation about the origins of our superficial reality and the intrusions of the unfathomable that protrude through it in a manner that is somewhat intelligible to human beings. I can glean all this from the music certainly, but it helps that the cover resembles a stained glass window made of intersecting and outwardly fanning waves of light- a picture of living and emancipated architecture submerged in the very fabric of the universe where the secrets of creation are threaded throughout the metamorphosis of it voluble DNA.
