UNDERSEA, for ensemble and electronics (2022)

Undersea is the journey of a drop of water, percussive and perpetual on the piano like its impact on the ground when the tap is badly closed, towards the unfathomable depths of the sea. It takes hold of us, with its hypnotic loop, then that the flood of electronic sounds, resembling waves, vortexes, infinity, plunges our listening into the unsuspected abysses of sound.

UNDERSEA was commissioned by the Ars Musica festival

Composer: Juan Arroyo
Flute: Renata Kambarova
Clarinet : Benjamin Maneyrol
Piano : Gian Ponte
Violin : Marion Borgel
Cello : Merryl Havard Alexandre
Photo: Nika Prokopenka
Audio recording : Renaud Carton

Live performance in November 29, 2022 at Ars Musica Festival by Ensemble Fractales at BOZAR - Belguim

UNDERSEA, for ensemble and electronics

Juan ARROYO
www.juan-arroyo.com
Photo by Kamir Meridja

Composer in residence at the Center Henri Pousseur (2014), IRCAM (2015), member of the Academy of France in Madrid-Casa de Velazquez (2016/17), composer in residence at the Art Zoyd Music Creation Center, member of the Académie de France in Rome-Villa Médicis for the year 2017/18, he is actually composer in residence at the National Orchestra of Peru.

Juan Arroyo was born in Lima, Peru. He studied composition at the Conservatories of Lima, Bordeaux and at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris. He deepens his musical knowledge in formations like Voix Nouvelles and the IRCAM. He has been guided by eminent composers such as Brian Ferneyhough, Heinz Holliger, Henri Pousseur, Mauricio Kagel, Michael Levinas, Luis Naón and Stefano Gervasoni.

His music is rewarded with numerous awards such as the prize of the Salabert Foundation (2013) and the prize of the Academy of Fine Arts of France (2015). He receives prestigious commissions from the French Ministry of Culture, Radio France, Centre Henri Pousseur, SACEM, Proxima Centauri and Tana string quartet. His works are performed by eminent musicians such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, L’Itinéraire, Linea, LAPS, L’Arsenale, Regards, Sonido Extremo, Orquesta Nacional de Perú, Vertixe Sonora, Claude Delangle, Jeanne Maisonhaute, Antonio Politano and Maribé Charrier. His music is performed at great festivals such as Ars Musica, Cervantino, La Chaise-Dieu, Ensems and ¡Viva Villa!

His work of composition is articulated around the Magical Sound Realism through the different techniques of sound hybridization. In fact, in 2014, he began a fundamental stage of his artistic work with the construction of new instruments capable of transmuting his sound, the TanaInstruments. This allowed him to hybridize the perceptual indices of sounds in order to reveal their evocative and irrational nature of their substance, sometimes making them enigmatic.

The uniqueness of his work lies in these games of displacement, of movement between a causal listening and a reduced listening, passing through many intermediate states of perception. Juan Arroyo explores these different degrees gradually blurring the sources of sound in the manner of a photographer or cameraman, making us travel from the concrete to the abstract, from materiality to immateriality, playing with the configuration of its objective.