Yanvalou is an installation from the work Demons.
In 2021 was exhibited in Aerodream. Architecture, design et structures gonflables 1950-2021 exhibition from Centre Pompidou. Curated by Frédéric Migayrou and Valentina Moimas.
Yanvalou is an installation from the work Demons.
In 2021 was exhibited in Aerodream. Architecture, design et structures gonflables 1950-2021 exhibition from Centre Pompidou. Curated by Frédéric Migayrou and Valentina Moimas.
Retrospective exhibition (2015-2001) in Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona. 03.03 – 12.04.2015
The exhibition focused on the collection of sounds from cabosanroque, detaching the artifacts, machines and instruments from the context in which they were created. Their machines, installations and shows produce new sounds which, like in the collections of past centuries, move between what is strange and beautiful, between wisdom and curiosity, all condensed in space and time in their particular collector’s cabinets. A collection of sounds means understanding the multiplicity of the sound world, finding a hidden meaning and, on the personal plane, apprehending the magnitude of what is marvellous in the discovery of each new sound.
During Easter 2010, Carles Santos and cabosanroque coincided at the Silence Procession in Murcia, and it’s here, in the middle of the silence, where Maquinofòbiapianolera , a piano and mechanical orchestra stage concert started its ignition.
The musical structure typical for a piano and orchestra concerto was achieved by the flirting and confrontation game between the man and the machine, the pianist and the mechanical orchestra, the natural rhythmic force that flows out of Santos and the velocity and precision of a computerized mechanical orchestra.
Maquinofobiapianolera is the superposition of two different composing worlds, The contemporary music world that draws on classical traditions and the experimental world that stems from rock and roll.
RRR is a dialogue without a map between the dance of La Veronal – choreographed by Marcos Morau and danced by Jon López, the music and the sound space of cabosanroque – with the unexpected machinations of Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut – and the pictorial images of Frederic Amat – who tense the painting with the action on stage.
With a constant buzz – curiosity, the enigma of three letters that illuminate -, RRR opens an unexpected space that each provides a very diverse background to explore and overcome the boundaries between image, sound and movement, to surprise the spectator until the fading, offering the mosaic of scenes to the audience’s sight and hearing in which the ink choreography stains the notes of the kaleidoscopic score of cabosanroque, which is torn by the breadth of La Veronal’s movement.
Ursonate Karaoke takes advantage of Karaoke’s liturgy to transcribe the Kurt Schwitter’s original poem by means of new phonemes, primitive electric sounds emerging from interferences between the magnetic fields illuminating the syllables and the sound amplification system. The neon letters produce new sounds which do not correspond to their phonemes -electric parasites-, new minimal sound units.
Ursonate (primitive sounds sonata) is a long sound poem, maybe the longest one in history. The author is the German artist Kurt Schwitters, who back in 1921 started to compulsively repeat the sequence of a typographic poem by Raoul Hausmann which reads like this: “Fmsbwtözäu, pgpggiv?mü, Fmsbwtözäu, pggiv?mü, Fmsbwtözäu, pggiv?mü…”. Finally, in 1932 he recorded and published Ursonate, a 55 minutes sonata which has become one of phonetic and typographic poetry highest expression.
Collective destruction of a string quartet by Haydn
Thus, the string quartet must be destroyed by stoning.
Haydn’s String Quartet 66 in G major, opus 77 is played. Or at least it was a while ago.
Each and every impact against the violins, viola or cello generates a slight random modification of the harmony, rhythm or tone of that voice and every hit takes us a little farther away from the original composition.
Every assault against the instrument is corresponded by an aggression against the musical form: to watch the destruction of the instruments while listening to the decomposition of Haydn’s Quartet hoping that eventually a beach will emerge.
One of the most known slogans in May 1968 in Paris was “sous les pavés, la plage!” (under the paving stones there is a beach!). The sentence referred to the sand which was revealed under the paving stones when the students set street barricades up. The beach, space of liberty, soft and shapeless, as opposed to the straight design of the streets and the regulated direction of traffic. Even when, finally, neither the beach nor the impossible showed up, along those days paving stones were thrown against all institutions, rules and hierarchies, with the conviction that collective force could destroy the established order.
The installation’s aim is to play with that positive sense of destruction and its capacity to bring about hope, despite of the uncertain final result. Destruction as a form of progress and collective creation.
The string quartet as a paradigm of the classicistic musical form (historic canonical moment and regulatory par excellence) is a strict framework of formal rules and restrictive relations amongst its four voices. An alteration of a single note can take the form to spaces conventionally forbidden.
Installation created for Llum BCN 2022.
Serres is a big paper lamp, a translucent mountain range that moves slowly among the vegetation, as if one could perceive geological time, the breathing of the mountains and the crackling of tectonic surfaces. The processed sound of the paper being wrinkled is combined with the beat and stridency of three moons that organize the choreography of the hulls.
Petrotuning explores the phenomenon of Auto-Tune, a digital effect that alters the pitch of a singing voice and that has become one of the defining sound traits of trap and other subgenres of contemporary urban music. This effect, through which a radically new form of vocal performativity has been created, is surprisingly linked to the world of crude oil.
The Auto-Tune audio processor was invented at the end of the 1990s by Andy Hildebrand, who applied knowledge he had acquired as an expert in geophysical prospecting techniques for the petrochemical industry. By means of controlled underground explosions and microphones, Hildebrand could determine the location of oil deposits and the exact spot in which to start drilling. Taking as its starting point the curious genealogical relationship between Auto- Tune and oil, the Petrotuning installation explores the sound and erotic-sensual dimensions of petro-masculinity.
Both cars and motorbikes have traditionally formed part of a particularly male imaginary in which the vehicle becomes a mechanical appendix of the driver’s body. The petrol tanks and exhaust pipes that form part of the Petrotuning installation recall the voluptuous forms of sexual organs, while at the same time evoking the sacred nature of relics and religious icons. This formal and iconographic ambiguity reinforces the disturbing sound dimension of an installation inspired both by the codes of sacred music and the melancholy that is characteristic of certain urban music genres.
In Petrotuning, the rhythms of trap and reggaeton are provocatively mixed with the melody of “O vos omnes”, written by the 16th-century priest and composer Tomás Luís de Victoria. As such, the Cabosanroque duo proposes an extraordinary contemporary version of the lament, a musical form typically found in operatic or religious works that expresses grief, guilt or sadness. The result is an impossible petro-trap oratorio that appeals to the pain and deep contradictions of our oildependent society.
Third part of the trilogy Three ways to enter.
“It is women who tell the story of war. They cry. They sing as if they were crying.”
Svetlana Alexievich, War Does Not Have the Face of a Woman, 2013.
As we delve into the sinister atmosphere of cabosanroque’s latest work, we embark on a journey filled with beauty amid the flowers of a world ravaged by war. We enter a forest, perhaps a garden… or was it a village? A work that combines literature, anthropology, sculpture, music, and artifact, all orchestrated under the baton of sound.
It speaks of war, and it is women and creatures who speak, and not only them but also the earth, the birds, and the trees. Everything that lives on the earth with us.
We will listen to fragments from the book of stories Journeys and Flowers, with the voice of women forced to flee from a current war. Transplanted into Ukrainian, Mercè Rodoreda’s words become incomprehensible sounds to us, yet they reveal an internal rhythmic logic, a musicality of the text that will survive beyond any translation.
Cabosanroque finds in War Does Not Have the Face of a Woman and Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich a perfect alliance with Mercè Rodoreda for this journey, which helps us understand the transition from reality and memory to fiction, and to what extent we need fantasy to prevent a reality, which cannot be digested or explained, from utterly devastating us.