Saturday, October 5, 2013

Sara Galan


Sara Galán started to play cello at a very young age. Since then she has been studying music on a classic basis until she was 18. After so many years of hard training as a classic cellist, she stopped playing it asphyxiated by pressure, and the impossibility of leaving the path of “perfection” of classic music training.

After a few years away from the cello she joint forces with Edu Comelles (PhD in Fine Arts, MSc in Sound Design (Edinburgh University) MA in Visual and Media Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia) on a collective endeavour called Cello + Lapto



TEASER - LA NOCHE AMARILLA/THE YELLOW NIGHT

Cello + Laptop is  a proposal that draws lines between the cello and compositional field recordings. The proposed project was born as improvisational and eventually become established as sound proposal in which the cello intersects with digital sound processing and sound landscaping.


Under the project have been published several virtual references. They have just released their first album in physical Parallel Paths at Envelope Collective Madrid-based label and they are preparing another full-length album for Audiotalaia.


Cello + Laptop acted in London, Bristol, Madrid, Cordoba, Salamanca, Barcelona and Valencia. They recently played at Sonar Festival in Barcelona.

They have made the soundtrack for a short film by Enrique Medrano called " La Noche Amarilla". In august 2013 they will start recording their second LP a sound study about the economical situation in Spain.


I´m Playing in This Room  is a recorded soundwalk inside the Sabatini Building (Part of MNCARS). It takes "I'm Sitting in THis Room" by Alvin Lucier as an inspiration.

At the Sabatini Building Sara Galán performed a five minute composition on different museum rooms. Every recording of the performances were transformed because of microphone positions and the room's acoustics. Edu Comelles wandered about as long as Sara Galán played the composition over and over.

As Cello + Laptop got more into experimentation with cello, Galán started to ask questions and confront her background with what was happening on a experimental level. All those conflicts and questions lead to a project that was thought to be a metaphor of her learning curve.


During summer 2011 Galán developed a software built in Max MSP and supported by the Kinect that analysed her movement while playing and this movement affected the sound of cello building sound structures that unbalance her performance. This is a system built to force the performer (her) to react to the glitches produced by software and built to enable her to forgot what she had learned and embrace an experimental work in process based on error, glitch and malfunction.
Finally after various attempts she managed to create a sound pattern based on recording and repetition of small parcels of sound and a semi-controlled Granular Synth that tweaked in real time the sound of her performance.

Incidencias aims to be a testimony of those recordings made on summer 2011. Those are a series of very short pieces in which Galán explores various sound possibilities of the cello being affected by the system built in Max MSP.

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SOURCE:
http://www.saragalan.net/
http://www.educomelles.com/
http://www.audiotalaia.net/