Ara Cristina Hernandez is a Mexican-American producer, songwriter, and visual artist. Her work is an investigative synthesis of sound and vision, and is interested in extracting truth from touching the unknown.
Through a fluid approach, sound becomes an intuitive process that can open unexpected doors and unfold instances of resounding light and clarity. The aim is to give into the unfolding, allowing desire to lead the way towards what resonates, breaking open hidden worlds that radiate outward.
Her debut record, Imminence, releases in May 2026.
She is currently based in Austin, Texas.
Through a fluid approach, sound becomes an intuitive process that can open unexpected doors and unfold instances of resounding light and clarity. The aim is to give into the unfolding, allowing desire to lead the way towards what resonates, breaking open hidden worlds that radiate outward.
Her debut record, Imminence, releases in May 2026.
She is currently based in Austin, Texas.
Written between 2021-2023, the record was born from a period of deep isolation and reckoning.
The dynamics hit like emotional waves, going from roaring guitars manipulated by tape machines in the climax of the record, “COLLAPSED TIME”, to moments of ultimate surrender in “Appearance (A Clearing)”. “7 SWORDS” and “BLACK HOLE” feel claustrophobic, manic, highlighting a depressive rage. The piano dirge “Un Ange Passe”, inspired by Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, sounds like it came out of an old haunted tape machine, evoking something similar to the more devastating moments of Grouper‘s Ruins. The spirit of Moon Musick era Coil feels constant in the searching nature and mystical essence of the sounds.
While sonically it covers a lot of ground, from industrial, to shoegaze, to ambient–– the continual thread is her ability to weave textures like haunting images. Sounds collide and collapse in unexpected waves, like the spiraling nature of healing and grief.
In the artist’s own words:
“I was asking myself, how do you live? How do you keep going? I hit rock bottom and then the bottom collapsed and I fell through the trapdoors and into the underworld. At the same time, I never felt so alive. I felt a need to release everything that I thought I was, everything that I’ve ever known…
Every session felt like an exorcism, a ritual, a seance. I had to walk away a lot of times, but it had to be wrung out of me. I had to bite into its center, the poison became the antidote. The maw became a womb. Healing is: grotesque, vulgar, ecstatic, physical, a balm, it’s all of it. And it is a spiral. This record is a document of it, a still in time, not an ending or resolution, but a framing, a container.
I walked through a tunnel, one I felt was well worn, and sharing it is me writing my mark on that tunnel, with my blood. I hope it resonates and with anyone who’s walked through the same tunnel, I hope my echoes show the ways out.”
