Oksana Linde is a Venezuelan composer that has been making electronic music since the 1980s, but has only assumed a wider public profile outside of Venezuela in recent years, starting with her 2022 debut record Aquatic And Other Worlds (1983-1989).
Her second album Travesías (out this month on Peru’s Buh Records) features pieces created between 1986 and 1994 in her private studio in Venezuela that had been unreleased until now.
According to Buh Records’ biography, Linde was born “in 1948 in Caracas to Ukrainian immigrant parents […] After leaving her work as a chemist due to health problems, Linde turned to music, experimenting with synthesizers to create an evocative sound universe. She produced a substantial amount of recordings during the 1980s…”.
Reflecting the late 80s and early 90s analog/digital transition period these pieces were recorded in, there is a mix of both analog and more early-digital sounding motifs across the album — according to this piece, Linde was primarily working with a PolyMoog, a Moog Source, a Casio CZ-1 and a Roland Space Echo.
(image credit: Buh Records)
As with other archival releases of this kind, there is a strange, but precious feeling to this sort of intensely private material that had been hidden away in the archives for several decades and is only seeing the light of the day now, thirty years later.
Fittingly for the story behind these recordings, there is a hazy, dream-like and almost fantastical quality to Travesías. Not quite songs and not quite sketches, the pieces revolve around an organic backdrop of deep, textural strings and dusky pads that is accompanied by careful, almost classical sounding keyboard melodies imbued with a sepia-tinged, tape-warble quality that really makes the music sound like long-forgotten tapes from another age.
Travesías feels “out of time” in a way that doesn’t easily fit into contemporary genre classifications, sitting somewhere between impressionism, early electro-acoustic radio music, classic synth-based film scores, ambient and new age — showing that even in 2025, the history of electronic music is far from fixed and still open to new discoveries.
Travesías is out now on Buh Records in digital and 12" vinyl formats.