Exploring the Musical Projects of Extraños en la Noche and Samuel Vio: Insights from Writer Rodrigo Olavarría

El Ciudadano

Original article: Los proyectos musicales Extraños en la Noche y Samuel Vio según el escritor Rodrigo Olavarría

By Platonos

For each date of the inaugural curatorial cycle of Platonos, a new music production company based in the capital, we invited someone to listen. Not necessarily a critic, but rather an individual whose musical ear comes from a different perspective.

Some people listen in unique ways. Not better, just different. From literature, landscapes, urban streets, melodies, rhythms, and years spent paying attention to elements that don’t easily explain themselves.

Thus, we asked writer Rodrigo Olavarría to listen to Samuel Vio and Extraños en la Noche (featured in the cover photo) before their live performance on May 23 at Espacio Diana, which will kick off at 7 PM, with tickets already available for purchase at Portaltickets.

Born in 1979 in Puerto Montt, Rodrigo Olavarría is a Chilean writer, poet, and translator. He has published numerous works in poetry, narrative, and essays, and is well-known for his translations of authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Patti Smith, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville. His writings explore themes of memory, autobiography, and contemporary culture. He is also the creator of @la_rocola_anticolonial.

Below, find Olavarría’s reflections.

Samuel Vio | Samuel Vio is a versatile artist, a musical driving force capable of crafting soundscapes with synthesizers and piano, without seeking the spotlight, combining poetry and photography within an installation as noted in his album Flores para mi muerte (2025). He also embodies a brilliant presence in his subsequent albums, Miel (2025) and Bon vivant (2026), presenting himself as a masked dandy at the center of an Athenian tragedy, a crooner, a character made possible by the invention of the microphone, or a troubadour, strumming a digital lute in his bedroom.

The precise lyricism of Samuel Vio maintains a delicate balance, steering clear of excessive sentimentality, allowing the beauty of his lyrics to seamlessly align with the memorably delicate melodies they ride. Consider moments from the album Miel, released in mid-2025, featuring lines like “You fell so tired from the plum tree of love” or “Books you left unfinished due to pain” from “Ciruelo,” evoking petals accumulating in plazas as spring dawns; or “You think you are matter and you dissolve in the wind / Brown eyes are caffeine through my nights” from “Materia,” which whispers the narrative of two lovers juxtaposing poetry against science, where Samuel Vio, illuminated by Venus, manages to work the alchemy of words with ones and zeros.

In his latest work, Bon vivant (2026), released just a month ago, we see his vocal range expand and the arrangements of his songs gaining depth. Echoes of influences persist, albeit refined through experience, as Samuel Vio allows them to shine through his compositions: the Bosé of Salamandra, the Sandro of “Trigal,” the Depeche Mode of A Broke Frame, the Melero of Los encargados and Rocío, always under the watchful shadows of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Bryan Ferry.

Samuel Vio’s voice has captured our attention, and we will follow his journey beyond the shadowy vertices, always on the side of song, crafting a slowly luminous bolero.

Extraños en la Noche | Extraños en la Noche (2023), the debut album from this coastal duo, serves as the medium for these dreamlike constructions built on hypnotic beats as foundations, a well-oiled desire machine completely distinct from generic, heartless electronic music. The duo of Catalina Narr (vocals) and Samuel Riquelme (vocals and keyboards) enchants as they navigate through a city ablaze with fire, invoking nocturnal visions in the finest traditions of house music, electronics, and no-wave.

How do they create anthems for the night? In their case, experience is key. They understand that the first step is to seduce the body and make it dance, followed by captivating the mind with an image or idea. They know that only then can they achieve their goal of conquering the heart, that impregnable stronghold, the ivory tower from which pop cannot be extracted. This and more is accomplished by Extraños en la Noche in the ten tracks of their self-titled album, a work released by BYM Records that has gathered years of experience on dance floors and appearances on platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud.

In the track “Lo de afuera,” the lyrics tackle the philosophical problem of the body, asserting that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon and the body is the vessel of being: “I don’t think anything matters more than what we see, / the body is what we are in the end.” This phenomenology of the body is true to the way the double helixes of DNA intertwine in this duo, the meditative melodies of Catalina and Samuel interwoven with the persistent dance anthem beats of tracks like “Las máquinas deseantes” and “Apocalipsis.”

A passionate, profoundly human voice speaks through the lyrics of Extraños en la Noche, and at dawn, gazing into the mirror, asks: What does it mean to be a body? How to inhabit this dismal reality? These questions remain unsolvable, but these silhouettes drawn in nocturnal vapors seem to possess the correct answer, always the same: head to the dance floor, surrender to the heartbeat’s beat, and see the self dissolve and disappear in the dance.