18 Jul Adrián de Alfonso
Festival ROTA – Residency period: June 2024
Bio
Born in La Coruña in 1978, raised in Barcelona, and based in Berlin since 2011, Adrián de Alfonso has a musical career that has continually meandered between noise and song.
In addition to releasing several albums and touring extensively under his former alias Don The Tiger (released on Crammed Discs), he has been a long-time member of Carla Bozulich’s live bands and has played with groups such as Bèstia Ferida, Veracruz, Homenatges, and Capitán. He has also worked in various contexts (music, film, installation, radio, performance, poetry, theater) with artists like Lucrecia Dalt, Regina de Miguel, Valerio Tricoli, Lydia Lunch, Aksak Maboul, Camille Mandoki, Arnau Sala, Alex Reynolds, Victor Herrero, Paloma Polo, El Guincho, Rubén Patiño, Francesco Cavaliere, Nuno Marques Pinto, Eduard Escoffet, Stecher, Juniper Foam, Krapoola, Olivier Arson, GY! BE, Sam Ashley, or Macromassa.
His musical universe is deeply rooted in flamenco, copla, bolero, tango, and sardana, sources he channels and transfigures through FM transmission, blurred sampling/midi techniques, snippets of musique concrète, raw chants, and delirious lyrical resources.
His work has been commissioned by institutions like Deutschlandfunk Kultur, MACBA, or the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, and has appeared in media such as The Wire, HBO, or Red Bull Music Academy Radio. He has also performed at festivals like Le Guess Who?, Meakusma, Seanaps, South By Southwest, Fusion, or Sónar.
Project in Blanca
For the past two years, Adrian has been working on a performance based on my new songbook, articulated around a new form of avant-garde ballad, raw, repetitive, and poetic. Skeletal and ritualistic music that he performs live with a bare voice and amplifies through FM transmitters, allowing attendees with a radio receiver to actively participate in the music. Encouraged to move around the space and find their own amplification strategies, listening and play are enhanced, creating a unique state of consciousness and a completely unpredictable sound context.
My proposal for the residency in Blanca would include several preparatory tasks to carry out and record this performance on video at the Rota festival. First, I would explore the nooks and crannies of Centro Negra and its surroundings to find a space that allows for appropriate sound diffusion for the performance.
Once the performance space is chosen, I would like to work with the other residents not only to share my working method with the transmitters and radios but also to experiment with them on the reflections, delays, interference points, or feedback that the environment could provide, thus expanding the sonic possibilities of the performance.
