Medialab Prado

On its Fifth Edition, IN-SONORA collaborates with three sound artists from Madrid’s scene whose work we consider of great interest. Hyperpotamus and Pangea will delight the public with direct sound, while Miguel Álvarez-Fernández will do an audiovisual presentation.

PROGRAMME

• Hyperpotamus: … a capela

• Miguel Álvarez-Fernández: proyecto DissoNoiSex

• Pangea: sonidos ásperos

Hyperpotamus: … a capela

Hyperpotamus’ music a cappella comes from a great amount of influences gathered through a life of contemplation, meditation and musical execution. His music comes out from a personal epiphany, cultivated with many years of theory conception, specially related to getting to do music as mental music, independently from the physical aspect. The result is music that is complicated to classify, a mix of different styles that are possible by the elasticity of the most complex and demanding instrument in history: the human voice.

The limitation to only using his voice is, paradoxically, what liberates Hyperpotamus when he visualizes melodic lines and harmonic patterns, which could not be accomplished without an orchestra (something he would make the most of, Patrons of the world, Listen!) His music is also a strong confrontation to artifice and effect, elements of which he thinks he currently abuses.  It is a game and a personal challenge:  to see how far can music that uses voice as its only instrument go: through a sampler and some microphones.  It’s almost like speaking of a modern man orchestra.

All this has brought the attention of some Cultural Programmers, who have been very generous in loosening their somewhat mysterious selective filter. This has allowed Hyperpotamus to bring his music wherever it takes him. Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Bratislava, Amsterdam, Berlin, Texas, California and New York are some of the places where Hyperpotamus has been able to show his vocal abilities, always aiming to spread his music beyond cultural and political boundaries, hoping that the public stops caring about nonsense things and pay attention to what’s really important: music.

Hyperpotamus, also known as Jorge Ramírez-Escudero, was born in Tokyo in a cold, Asian, fall morning in 1981. Five years later, he started playing the piano in London, where he lived until he was 10 years old.  In Chile, reaching puberty, he received his first drum lesson and he also came up with the notes for Nothing Else Matters for the Spanish Guitar, an instrument whose mother lent him afraid of him becoming too attached to “drums”. In Madrid he started playing drums in different bands with various names like Nino Rabo, Fire Exit, Abner, Kompoloi (where he was a pianist) and Kodama. Tired of carrying the drums up and down, he decided to abandon these bags and reduce his instrumental necessities to the minimum, which brought to the a cappella show that he is working on now. A lover of paroxytone words and all that is influenced by children’s stories, he is renamed “Hyperpotamus”, hoping that cultural programmers, producers and editors will not misspell his so well thought pseudonym.

www.myspace.com/hyperpotamus

Miguel Álvarez-Fernández: DissoNoiSex project

He will present his recent sound work comprising composition, radio programming, writings, and installations… He will emphasize in this last medium showing the sound and interactive installations developed with Stefan Kersten and Asia Piascik, DissoNoiSex Collective. With them he will open the exhibition “Casa de muñecas” (Dollhouse) at Menosusno Space as part of IN-SONORA V (October 25- December 6).

Miguel Álvarez-Fernández (1979) is a sound artist, composer, musicologist, curator of sound art projects and radio producer born in Madrid (Spain). He studied composition at the San Lorenzo de El Escorial Conservatory, which he later continued to study in Germany (Darmstadt, Kürten, Berlin) and other centres in Spain.  Between 2002 and 2005 he was awarded an artist Residency at Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes. His works as a sound artist and composer have been presented in Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy and The United States. He has worked as a composer in different centres and labs in Spain (LIEM/CDMC, Medialab Madrid, GME in Cuenca) and, since 2005, he is a guest composer in the Electronic Music Studios of The Technical University in Berlin, where he also teaches since 2007. In 2004 he obtained the Diploma of Advances Studies at the Department of Art History and Musicology from the University of Oviedo when finishing his research  “Voice and electroacoustic music: a Methodological Proposal”, which analyzes the connections between musical aesthetics in new media and the philosophy of language. This year he will start teaching in this Department, while preparing his Doctoral Dissertation focused in researching the aesthetics of voice and technology. His theoretical researches have been presented in different conferences, congresses and publications. He also organizes and curates artistic projects such as “Itineraries of Sound”, celebrated in different public spaces in Madrid in 2005.

He has also developed various electroacoustic composition projects for movies, among which stand the Original Score for the Movie “Vía Láctea” in 2007. Directed by Lina Chamie, the film was presented in Cannes and Sebastian Film Festival among others. Since 2008 he directs and presents a weekly radio program on electroacoustic music and experimental creation in Radio Clásica de Radio Nacional de España.

DissoNoiSex (www.dissonoisex.org)
miguelalvarezfernandez.wordpress.com

Pangea: Rough sounds

Pangea works with rough sounds giving them a floating and hypnotic sense. “Compositions in which, inexhaustibly, there are flapping impulses and drones with changing profiles in saturated crowded spaces. They travel through a panel of rich frequencies that brings a structure sound palette of extreme variety and subtlety. Sporadically, by giving a velvet quality to abrupt textures and crude constructivist sounds, they bring captivating tones that sharpen hypnotism and revive fantasy”. - Sarah Vacher

Pangea is Madrid musician Juan Antonio Nieto's alter ego.  It is his most radical and experimental project and, amazingly, the one that has had a stronger international repercussion, as his works have been published by Record Companies in Europe -Russia, Belgium, Sweden, France, Portugal, Greece, Holland, Germany, Spain – and also in America -United States, Argentina and Mexico. -  He has also collaborated with some of the most prestigious artists of avant-garde music such as the Brazilian classical composer Leo Alves Vieira, with whom he has worked with string quartets and chores, and the Japanese writer Kenji Siratori, who has given voice to his compositions. His music has been included in art installation at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and at the Centro Cultural de España in Buenos Aires.

In his compositions, Juan Antonio Nieto uses Computer Music, Field Recordings as well as traditional electroacoustic instruments, creating oppressive and irritating sounds that, when combined in a subtle and poetic manner, they bring a captivating and hypnotic atmosphere or, as Sarah Vacher described,  “compositions in which, inexhaustibly, there are flapping impulses and drones with changing profiles in saturated crowded spaces.  They travel through a panel of rich frequencies that brings a structure sound palette of extreme variety and subtlety. Sporadically, by giving a velvet quality to abrupt textures and crude constructivist sounds, they bring captivating tones that sharpen hypnotism and revive fantasy”

Nearly all these works can be found in the licensed website Creative Commons. The way he edits his music follows an ideology defending democratization and free and universal access to culture at no cost. This way of distributing music stops big company’s uncontrolled lucrative ambition and its commercial impositions that rescind artistic creativity and oppose to the musician’s free will.

http://pangea-juanantonionieto.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/juanantonionieto
http://www.virb.com/pangea