The project I am working on started with a sudden rush of nostalgia, likely catalyzed by living abroad. This feeling compelled me to establish a connection with my city, Buenos Aires and my own personal history.
I remember my mother mentioning that my great-grandfather was a pianist, composer, and doing the clandestine craft of ghostwriting for other musicians. I asked my mother for his records or any sound material she could have kept but unfortunately she didn’t have anything. Most of his original work has suffered from destruction, sale or loss over time. Driven by curiosity and desire to delve deeper, I reached out to his publisher, Editorial Perrotti, who surprisingly safeguarded eleven authentic scores including diverse genres such as tangos, vals, paso-dobles, and even a shimmy. These styles held immense popularity during the 1930s in Buenos Aires and these scores served as preliminary sketches before being rearranged for ensembles and orchestras. Intriguingly, there is no audio recording of that time, which kept the mystery even more interesting: an array of symbols in a pentagram with no musical reference to validate.

Last December, I traveled back to Buenos Aires, and decided to form my first all-woman ensemble to reinterpret my great grandfather’s compositions. During a couple of rehearsals and recording sessions we managed not only to record five of his original scores but also to interpret alternative (open) variations, with the aim of going beneath the surface and capturing any sonic nuances resisting the conventional notation and style.
Using diverse techniques such as pitch shifting, looping intervals, reshuffling sequences, and extending durations well beyond the original, the compositions underwent a significant transformation, characterized by a process of loss and re-appropriation.

Following my return to my studio in Amsterdam and digested the recordings, I was drawn to add some vocals that elusively bring back some tango melodies with an extra layer of abstract electronics.

The distortion and manipulation of materials plays for me an important role in reveling the distance between traditional composition and a non conventional approach to an expansive idea of music.A 20-minute presentation during amatter’s event (Berlin, October 2023) would be the first attempt to perform these materials live. Specifically, I would like to experiment with repetition, imitation, substitution, and abstraction.
The piece will evolve through improvisation with my computer, pre-recorded sounds, some live electronics, and experimental singing. Preferring not to treat music as a linear and authoritative entity, my intention is to investigate chaotic and disobedient sonic materials that disrupt the gallery’s prevailing silence and authoritative atmosphere, periodically erupting with bursts of abstract electronics and vocal expressions.

With each new transformation, the initial melodies are subjected to distortion and reversal.
Taking sounds from the past into the present, the original music gently distorts and degrades, accommodating to a kind of balance between production and loss.

Focus during residency

During my residency at QO2, as part of the Talent Development Grant (NL) supported by The Stimuleringfonds, I intend to immerse myself in the process of listening to all the sound experiments I conducted over the year. This will enable me to carefully select the content for an upcoming EP. The album will weave together multiple temporalities, incorporating tracks originally recorded in Buenos Aires, sound recordings from Amsterdam, and a live performance in Berlin (October 2023). In parallel I would like to investigate some possibilities to extend the sound pieces into an installation.