“Not even Arvo Pärt’s Gregorian chants could save her.”

When life tears your heart out, music has a way of suturing it back into place before you lose consciousness for good. This is what it feels like to immerse oneself in Trozos De Mí (Pieces Of Me), the latest project from Bogotá, Colombia-based pianist and composer Valentina Castillo (under the stage name Uva Lunera). Having previously explored her idiosyncratic blend of minimalism, groove, and songcraft across a travelogue of studio and live settings, she has produced what is, so far, her most intimate and transformational multimedia experience.

Combining sound, text, and video, Trozos De Mí is a journey, not in the sense of moving nomadically from one place to the next but of exploring the same place over and over until it becomes something totally different by the scuff marks of footprints and the stains of blood (and other effluvia) left behind. It is the latter we follow into this, her second full-length album, which by virtue of its unraveling gives us plenty of fiber to twine around ourselves in empathic understanding of the ache it so honestly captures.

Through the machinery of eight major organs surrounded by the skin of an “Opening” and “End,” the figure we glimpse beckons with one hand and holds us off with the other. We sustain this push and pull like the tearing of a muscle. What at first announces itself as an excruciation morphs with each touch of the keyboard into a lull of healing. That cusp between debilitation and revivification is where Castillo is most in her element as a performer, so that her recollections of fierce romance rage like an oil fire on a stove sucked of its oxygen by the range hood of memory.

From the fragments of “Deleite” (Delight) to the reparations of “Podéis Ir En Paz” (You Can Go In Peace), she rounds the edges of every shard just enough to be holdable without cutting through the fingers. And what a blessing that is when those fingers are the primary salvation bringers in a world of broken instruments. In the manner of bodies close and electric yet playing out the dances and separations that define every infatuation, she gives herself to the moment, knowing that whatever pieces she loses are opportunities for the clay of retelling to take their place. In “Deja Vú,” especially, she molds those traumas of repetition into something grander, less hesitant. As hurt turns into laughter and back into hurt, she leaves the piano to dance—the only coping strategy that makes sense as she delves deeper into the missing time of her autobiography.

And so, from the throes of adulthood to the quietude of childhood, she wraps herself in “Una Mantita” (A Little Blanket), a lullaby that reaches like starlight through slatted blinds without ever touching her sleeping face. Instead, that maternal glow is interrupted by “Padre,” whose stoic malevolence carves a shadow of resistance. Couched in this forlorn image is the tale of a Catholic priest (“Yes! I’m not the only one who calls him ‘Father,’” she quips) who prompts songs of forgiveness in the daughter he abandoned. However, that forgiveness must be gifted to herself, so tender that it can only be felt, never seen. This paternal hurt reaches its breaking point in “Un Duelo, Una Pausa” (A Duel, A Pause), in which drummer Rafa Lozina evokes a body scarred by too many paper cuts, each page a blade of awakening.

In closing, we are swept into a theme song for moving on. With terms settled and corporeality mended, she looks back while keeping one toe dipped into a future yet to be sung. Thus, her state of mind is always present with the listener. She sits before you, face to face, holding your hands in hers, the only completion of a circuit needed for us to know its electricity.

Trozos De Mí is available to experience in full on YouTube here. Let yourself go, and it will catch you.