Before the release of his new record Ador or Entropy, the Galician artist Miguel Prado’s project Nzʉmbe hadn’t put out an album since 2015. His return to the musical moniker comes in the form of a fully realized electro-acoustic song cycle. Ardor or Entropy is both romantic and severe; it combines rough digital textures with sometimes tortured singing, executed in the artist’s mother tongue, to create a sort of sonic minefield, one that is as unpredictable as the world itself. We sent some questions to Prado—read his answers and listen to the new record below.

Ardor or Entropy is your first album in nine years. Why the long break?

 

Miguel Prado: While life has certainly been busy, with things like my work in philosophy and dealing with MS, none of that is the real reason for the gap. Time feels strange when you’re creating something that has to simmer, unfurl, and self-destruct over and over. Unlike working within a band, where the collective energy and cycles of positive feedback can propel you forward (nor with deadlines or labels breathing down your neck), alone, the project becomes its own creature feeding on whatever sparks and doubts I throw at it. It’s like chasing smoke—you think you’ve got it, then it morphs. That’s where the real tension comes from: you get a piece that evolves on its own terms, growing into something almost alien from where you started. This album isn’t linear, and it’s not “efficient.” It’s a living thing that’s happy to sit right on the edge of becoming. And maybe that’s exactly why music like this might be doomed to fail, in the traditional sense, like something caught mid-transformation. There’s risk in letting a project live and breathe that way because it won’t guarantee anything—not easy success, not general appeal, maybe not even immediate understanding. But that’s also the point. It’s a strange irony: to make something real, you have to let go of any need to win or even to finish in the conventional sense. 

 

What have you learned as a musician and producer in the time between records?

 

I’ve learned a lot. Above all, I’ve been fighting against forms of musical conventionalism, norms you find in “deconstructed club music,” “experimental beat-based, and even ambient music.” I’ve been thinking and trying a lot of stuff in terms of spatial depth using distortion products (otoacoustic emissions) inspired by the work of Maryanne Amacher, thinking a lot about the distributed airborne nature of sound perception. I’ve also come to loathe certain gear with a passion: closed-back DJ headphones, near-field monitors—anything that isolates or contains the experience of sound into these tight, restricted spaces. These tools, as widely used as they are, actually contribute to the standardization of music’s sound in ways people don’t talk about enough. There’s a lot of conversation around algorithms and recommendation systems shaping the music to come, but far less about how certain technical setups like these silently dictate sonic aesthetics.

 

As a player, singer or instrumentalist, I’m actually super limited, but I’m exceptionally skilled when it comes to synthesizing sounds and programming gear, but if I’m honest, I’d love to be a better singer. There’s a rawness and a vulnerable fragility in the human voice that it’s difficult to find elsewhere. 

 

Could you explain the song cycle concept related to this album?

 

It’s a meditation on the inevitability and irreversibility of entropy and love, how both are drawn toward the stillness and fragmentation of cosmic dissolution. Think of it as a sort of Tristan-and-Iseult retelling, where passion doesn’t simply burn out; it stretches, thins, and distorts into silence, like the light from a star that's dying, still shining on as it drifts off into the cold darkness.

 

It’s also an exploration of how we’re pulled toward stillness, the inevitable pull of entropy in every touch, every heartbeat. It’s a love story, yes, but one that dares to walk the line between intimacy and oblivion, where what’s most human begins to dissolve into something static, untouchable. It’s like the universe’s own version of love fading out—at some point, there’s no more useful energy left to exchange, nothing to keep things moving forward. That’s what they call heat death: the point where everything just … Slows down, winds down.

 

It’s almost poetic, in a twisted way, that some of the founders of thermodynamics—who spent their lives proving that everything is bound to end in heat death, in stillness and silence—decided to get there a little faster. Ludwig Boltzmann, who uncovered the statistical nature of entropy, struggled with depression and eventually took his own life. Paul Ehrenfest, building on Boltzmann’s work, also tragically ended his life and the life of his son, who had Down syndrome. When you look at it like that, the album taps into a similar energy. Knowing that all things drift toward stillness gives every fleeting spark a kind of sacred urgency. Look, I don’t buy into the soft, cosmic nihilism of the death drive. This isn’t about surrendering to entropy, it’s about embracing the raw energy of life as it accelerates toward dissolution. Thermodynamics shows us that the universe is on a trajectory towards decay, but that doesn’t inspire despair. If anything, it’s exhilarating: a kind of high-voltage realism. The beauty isn’t in defying entropy; it’s in riding it, exploiting the transient bursts of intensity that emerge along the way. This album isn’t a meditation on death; it’s an experiment in living at the edge of collapse, tapping into the current that hums beneath entropy. It’s about amplifying those moments of life that cut through the static, pushing forward as everything hurtles toward silence. There’s a strange kind of vitality in that—a relentless, “unsentimental” embrace of the real. 

 

What are your thoughts about the larger idea of world building? Do you have any major influences from literature or cinema that help to guide your approach to recording and making records?

 

Pynchon, Fassbinder, and Tarkovsky are massive influences for me, though it's hard to say exactly how much they permeate my music directly. It’s less about translating their aesthetics directly and more like an osmotic process, where their approaches to human fragility, narrative dissonance, and fractured space bleed into the music’s temperament.

 

There's something interesting I've noticed when it comes to world-building, especially in sci-fi, and that’s how some of the most compelling examples come from places outside the privileged, expansive, heteronormative narratives. If you look at authors such as Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, the Strugatsky brothers, or Stanislav Lem, you’ll often see them reimagining a horizon of possibilities—a future that needs to be radically constituted. World-building becomes essential for them because they’re writing from within a present where their identities—whether in terms of gender, ethnicity, or social circumstance—are in friction with the dominant social order. What’s inspiring about this for me is the potential of narrative itself as a kind of basic, speculative technology. It’s a way to harness imaginative potential and mobilize it, to disrupt current limitations and contribute to the constitution of new communities or even a new world. To paraphrase Kant from the Opus Postumum: “He who would know the world must first manufacture it” 

 

There’s an irony in how certain sci-fi works (not even very old) have laid the groundwork for the very dystopian reality they once imagined. Take Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, for example—a novel that presents a hyper-capitalist, fractured society dominated by corporations and private interests. It’s meant as satire, but the world Stephenson created, with its laissez-faire capitalism and anarcho-libertarian flavor, seems to have become a blueprint for Silicon Valley’s ambitions. Stephenson himself went on to work with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin, and his concepts have directly influenced techno-feudal lords like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and, of course, Mark Zuckerberg, who literally named his entire corporate vision after Stephenson’s term “metaverse.” In a strange inversion of the creative power of world-building, what we see here isn’t an aspirational future but a self-fulfilling dystopia—a fictional landscape that has, bizarrely, become aspirational for those who have the power to reshape reality in its image. It’s like they latched onto the cynicism without irony, a “weird counterpart” to world-building where the speculative future doesn’t challenge the present but reinforces and amplifies its worst tendencies. Instead of imagining new forms of community or possibility, this type of world-building contributes to the construction of a reality that mirrors Stephenson’s dystopia all too closely—a reality that serves the interests of the powerful while accelerating social fragmentation and inequality.

How did you work with collaborators on Ardor or Entropy?

 

The way I worked with collaborators on this album was really varied. In some cases, I had the pleasure of being there with them, actively directing the sessions, and most of the musicians are credited—though not all. But regardless, each collaborator had a significant influence on the music. Some were working remotely, sending material from far-off places, which I then heavily re-edited and reshaped. There’s no mystique here. Rashad was incredibly generous with their time, especially in addressing those technical aspects I discussed earlier—the ones that often lead to the overly standardized sound in many productions. Processing and finding the right tone for my voice was a massive ordeal for me—it took a lot of work and confidence-building to settle on the right “color.” We went through endless rounds of re-synthesizing, re-pitching, and exploring different techniques. Rashad put in a tremendous amount of effort on this; he really helped bring the voice to a place where it felt both vulnerable and expressive, and I’m incredibly grateful for his dedication to that process.

 

Could you tell us more about sound design on “Zone of Alienation.”

 

Alienation zones, or exclusion zones, are areas that have been evacuated and restricted due to dangerous contamination, like Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout. In the 90s, Ukraine’s post-Soviet collapse led many desperate people to enter these zones, risking lethal radiation to scavenge metal and resources. This eerie, abandoned atmosphere influenced the sounds at the beginning of the track. But the sound design … I’m not even sure if that’s of any interest to the audience, honestly. The original recordings were actually quite traditional—a classic, orchestrated pop song with that chamber feel. But once those initial takes were done, that’s when the tedious, consuming process began. Editing, re-editing, and processing layer after layer, I applied techniques that everyone’s familiar with these days but in a rather counterintuitive way. It’s a kind of transformation that takes ages but ultimately gives these chamber pop foundations a surreal, almost alien quality.

 

How do you navigate the arrangements on these songs?

 

The arrangement is for me the primary vehicle for storytelling. I consider every sound as a narrative tool and too often, I find left-field music leaning on arrangements that become formulaic in their supposed unpredictability, or genre music relying on these tropes that feel essentialist and hollow. It’s honestly depressing, it’s as if the very spaces that should be “radical” have instead become a loop, recycling the same structures and sounds to the point of exhaustion. Think about the resurgence of nu-metal “school-shooter soundtrack” gimmicks or late-90s indie tropes, it is honestly just another post-ironic revival, what’s the difference let’s say with other reactionary aesthetic movements like the revival of traditionalist Catholicism? We all know exactly which artists we're talking about here—those with an extractivist attitude toward these aesthetics. Obviously, I prefer non-linear arrangements, steering away from typical verse-chorus formats to allow songs to unfold more like discrete abstract patterns. I try to convey the themes and imagery of the songs through the arrangements that I consider to be as essential as the core tune. For me, arrangement isn’t about organizing a melody or harmony but about sculpting sound masses that could build or discover new, imaginary or counterfactual worlds. Ideally, some realignment in our thinking should occur. 

 

What music has been making you happy as a listener lately?

 

Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche 85, Mk.gee, Chuquimamani-Condori, Xennakis’ Gendy 3 … Miguel Prado.