This piece is a homage to Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and, perhaps, the best-known poem of Federico García Lorca 'Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías'. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was a Spanish bullfighter and poet much admired by artists from Generación-del-27 - an influential group of Spanish avant-garde poets (1923-1927). This piece of music portrays a series of tumultuous incidents related to the tragic death of the Matador Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. By using discontinuities within the musical landscape, and selected modulations of several frequency spectra around numerological rationales (with an emphasis in the numbers 13 and 16, but more in this later), a cinematic landscape is attempted to narrate a series of biographical events on the life of this matador. "After retirement, 1934 Ignacio Sánchez Mejías returned to bullfighting and on August 11, 1934 Sanchez was bullfighting in place of a fellow Matador (Ortega Cano) ... the bulls were great that day and he did not want to seem like he was avoiding them. He had no car, no hotel, not even a cuadrilla (bullfighting team). For the first time in his life, he turned to the lottery and drew two tickets with the numbers of the bulls of Ayala that he was scheduled to fight. The first, number 16, Granadino, docile, thin-horned and coarse-skinned, nevertheless gored him. He did not want to be operated on in the miserable infirmary and asked to be taken back to Madrid, but the ambulance took several hours and the trip went very badly. Two days later he was diagnosed with gangrene. He died, in pain and delirium, on the morning of the 13th." This is one of many stories that my father (a bullfighter aficionado), used to tell me when I was younger and this piece also reflects my perception of life as a continuum in which discontinuities shape meaning being 'death' the type of discontinuity I am must intrigued by. I hope you enjoy the piece. References: (1) Andrés Amorós, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Alianza Editorial, 1998. ISBN 8420638579; (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio_Sánchez_Mejías. 

Matador - 2009

El Toque de Silencio - The sound of silence (2003):
Juan Talega dies in 1971

Juan Talega was a singer whose roots were in Alcalá de Guadaira, but he spent his life in Dos Hermanas, a small town just outside of Seville. His rough, no frills, gypsy voice is one of the darkest and most haunting voices in the history of this ancient art.

Juan Talega, who was born in 1891, never sung professionally until he was in his seventies and the soleares, siguiriyas, and toñas were said to have been his favorite styles. 
He was the nephew of Joaquin El de la Paula, a man that would teach Juan Talega the secrets of the orthodox flamenco song. Joaquin el de la Paula was gypsy cantaor who lived his life in a small cave near the castle in Alcalá de Guardaura, singing for pleasure and rarely for money, but he was to introduce a style of soleá that is still performed today.

Joaquin was an exceptional flamenco legend, molding the song into his own creation, the lyrics being spontaneously invented as he sang His cante was passed down to him through generations of singers, and Joaquin and his brother, Augustin Talega, passed them on to Juan.

Juan Talega spent the majority of his life working as a horse and cattle dealer and only sang at juergas and intimate gatherings; but word of his singing spread through the surrounding towns of Seville and he became one of the most revered singers of the old styles of Alcalá. 
Juan Talega won the 1959 Cordoba Consurso de Cante Jondo in the toñas and soleares sections, and he was also one of the judges that resided over the third Llave de Oro contest in 1962. But he was said to be uncomfortable in these surroundings and was only really at ease with intimate private gatherings. 
Antonio Gala who witnessed one of Juan Talega’s first stage appearances wrote “ Juan Talega with his facies leonina of an age old leper, was there on stage, cornered, sidestepping, cleaning the dry sphinx of his face with a large handkerchief. He was there and he was not.

Juan appeared at many of the festivals in Andalucía accompanied by guitarist Diego del Gastor, who said that Juan’s fabulous siguiriyas and soleares would leave the audience breathless.

Juan Talega sang styles of siguiriyas that he learned from his father Augustin, and these siguiriyas could be traced back to Diego el Fillo. Agustin Talega was a man who knew more styles of toñas than any other singer alive in his time and this contributed to Juans vast understanding of the cante jondo.

Juan Talegas voice had a ghost like echo of his genealogical past and his martinete and soleares de Alcalá are shatteringly eerie.
Towards the end of his life he would be found sitting on an old chair in the street outside of his home in Dos Hermanas, an olive cane in his hand, which was used to beat out the ryhthm to his song.

Singers would come from miles to listen to his mastery and to steep themselves in the old secrets of his cante. Juan Talega died in Dos Hermanas in 1971.

Reference: http://www.andalucia.com/

El toque de silencio (The call for silence)

Field recording bushes berlin

Flowers in the Attic

Circuit By Peter B
PCB By Meng Qi

Solo play on the AWESOME analog "drum and drama" machine, with a touch of spring reverb.

My pcb is much easier to build than Peter's paper circuit plans which are here:
ciat-lonbarde.net/rollz5/index.html

Thank you Peter for the awesome design!

www.mengqimusic.com

Meng Qi - Roolz-5 First Recording

While studying music theory/composition at the Music Conservatory of Caracas Jose Angel Lamas, Dr. Jesus Lopez-Donado received his BSc (Hons) in Electronics Engineering from the Simon Bolivar University (Venezuela) in 1997, later, his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence applied to signal processing from the University of Ulster (UK), in 2003 and his postgraduate certificate in education from the same institution in 2004. He has exhibited several installations and performed with a number of experimental bands. In February 2000 he joined the School of Information Engineering at the University of Ulster as a lecturer in multimedia and bioinformatics. He then emigrated to australia and became an A/Prof at USQ. He has being associate editor in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and an invited editor for the IEEE Transactions’ series and the journal of computational creativity. His research interests are in,computational creativity (biological complexity applied to music), bioinformatics, medicine and generative music. He has published over 30 articles, one edited book (available here) and one monograph (available here). Pursuing more humanistic goals, he undertook post-graduate medical studies (2007-2010) at Griffith University Australia and now practice as a medical practitioner. He believes that, despite an ubiquitous demand for specialization in modern society, the idea of a modern homo universalis (polymath) is still fundamental and achievable by fully integrating artistic, humanistic and scientific endeavors within a sole ideological framework.

El toque de silencio (The call for silence)

LopezDoNaDo

Related tracks