1. Calama

The piece begins with the desert as seen from the airplane, the shock of its size and grandeur, followed by my arrival at the hotel and the first night there before going to San Pedro the next morning, about an hour drive from Calama. The dual feeling of excitement and fear, happiness and misery, ugliness and beauty.

2. Camino a San Pedro

Second day, woke up in that place and went to the car rental. After waking up I remembered "I was there", so the movement starts with the same grandeur intro followed by my happy and excited car trip to San Pedro. After a while the music stops, representing my stop at some point of the road in the middle of the desert, and my astonishment to notice the silence. How such a gigantic place can be so silent never occurred to me. After some moments of awe and wonder, I get back in the car off to San Pedro.

3. Ruka Zen

Ruka means "hut" and zen means "meditation". The idea of being completely alone, and having house things to do, sounded better than staying at a hotel, so I rented this little house in a neighborhood of San Pedro, some 2 miles from the center, with just some empty lots and few neighbors around. This is where the trip really started. The main tune I took from a wind chime that was hanging there at Ruka Zen that made that melody. I added some wind effects to remember the breeze through the tree behind the house. Peace and beauty, plus the big mountains far away, should be the mood of the movement, together with doubt; "what the hell am I doing here?"

4. Salar

The ocean of salt. A weird place, with some small lakes full of micro-organisms (all cataloged and explained in plaques for tourists). The music depicts my wondering about that strange place. Then there were some flamingos. One shouldn't get close to them, as it was their mating season and they could fly away, and this part is the more tonal beautiful part in the middle. Then back to wondering and off back home.

5. Lagunas y La Pesadilla

Roughly translated,"Lakes and the Nightmare". Two central moments of the trip; my visit to Paradise - lakes Miñiques and Miscanti at 5,900m altitude (19.300 feet), near snowed covered volcanoes, the place where I wanted to be buried when I die. They have dark blue waters and are surrounded by salt, the most beautiful place I've ever been. The music represents my going up there; a crescendo of anticipation reaching the top and being struck by this vision of the lake (the trombones literally represent my mouth falling to the floor). This is followed by the great nightmare I had that same night, so it's kind of an anticlimax, or the other side of paradise. Everything was dual, heaven and hell, one part of the other. After a violent section representing the nightmare it goes down to waking up and going outside at 4AM, looking at the big moon in the sky, and something I thought was a cloud, but was actually a nebula, surprisingly visible to the naked eye.

6. Adios

My goodbye to Atacama, the end of the trip. A sort of recapitulation of the first "grandeur" theme at the beginning, only now peaceful and with a more beautiful, romantic harmony. A goodbye to home, the saddest part of the piece.

7. São Paulo

I still lived in São Paulo, which was, coming back from Atacama, the worst place on Earth, the most horrible hell imaginable. The first thing I thought was that, while Atacama is a living desert, São Paulo is a dead one. This piece is more dissonant and purposely ugly. There's only one tonal chord at the end, before the very last dissonant chord, that would be a comparison between the two deserts. It ends with the loudest possible bang on a gong that lasts forever. This movement would need some improvements and revisions, but it's more or less right. It's the anti-Atacama music, so it should be uglier, more anguish. Maybe changes for the future.