Seven episodes, images, atmospheres
The seven episodes are „stages“ for certain behavior patterns of a familiar, moral or erotic nature. Each of the seven acts will evoke a particular atmosphere and highlight one or some of the characters. The actors are three entities. Each of these entities is never a single person, but two, three, or five; a schizophrenic diversity that, as the human soul, it can be a multi-headed chimera. These partly imaginary, partly real spaces (acoustic or physical) are inspired by Louise Bourgeois‘ installation Red Rooms from 1994. For Bourgeois, the color red represents blood, violence and danger, shame, jealousy, malice, and guilt. According to Bourgeois, this work would represent different kinds of pain: physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and intellectual. It deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, with the allure of seeing and being seen.
The stage is simultaneously a place of memories, events, a crime scene, and a temple. Places that are at the same time concrete and archetypal, like a bed, a cage, and the forest, meet objects like spy cameras, radios, and other enigmatic apparatuses. Under the direction of Miguel Angel Gaspar, the musicians‘ bodies perform a panoply of physical expressions and body theatres—movements, tremblings, dances, jumps, touchings, escapes. They reveal a wide variety of perspectives and show emotional moments that often remain hidden to the participating observers.
The ensemble, the soloists, the field recordings, and the other pre-recorded sounds play on all levels. They show the audience outer landscapes, intimate atmospheres of the spaces and rooms, the beings‘ emotional state, and the penetration and mingling of the role images co-constructing the respective spheres, either meandering back and forth between them or commenting on them.
The music and sounds are a composition in a very Castelló-language: mixtures and wonderings between minimalistic materials by the time that long unisons stroll through micro intervals and small movements. Slowness and anti-virtuosismo; quotations, the use and abuse of early music (Gibbons, Ockeghem, Monteverdi), pop music and other objets trouvés, which then go to extremes, repeatedly breaking through this withdrawn attitude with walls of noise, rock, drones, sine waves, imperceptible low frequencies, capricious radio sounds and other „audio greetings from the Aether,“ trying to move the most resistant cells inside the bodies of the listeners.
The live electronics—the Revox tape machine—create the (surrounding) space or, in other words, the gut through which everything passes. The guts in which the incoming (raw) materials are eaten and transformed.