MUTEKLIVE108 - Laura Luna
Laura Luna (MX)
Thursday June 2, 2016 - Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC)
Mastered by Pheek.
WHO: Mexican multimedia artist, musician and producer Laura Luna de Castillo, currently living in Prague
STYLE: Experimental minimalist compositions, emotive organic sonics, lo-fi meets high-tech immersive electro
LATEST WORK: Isolarios (2014)
LABELS: Baba Vanga
MORE: In 2015, created a sound performance with Sasha Laskowski inspired by the process of coal mining, and played a live A/V set of mechanical drones and distortion with Michal Kindernay at Prague’s MENU LABoratory
A multimedia artist turned composer, Laura Luna de Castillo deals in atmosphere creation, eschewing staid actualities for magic realism and darkly imagined cosmic travels. Part mysterious raconteur, part technological phenom, Castillo coaxes elegantly entangled texture and complex emotion out of her machines.
A photographer turned video and film artist, in 2013, Castillo began to experiment with music: perceiving sound as a powerful art form for enhancing memories and narratives – she recorded sounds around her that triggered emotions and memory fragments, building them into a rich tonal music. Galvanized by those field recordings, Castillo centralized sound in her work. Using field recordings, a modded Atari computer, a gameboy and various synths, she constructed her own sounds to describe fantastical scenes and narratives, creating soundtracks for sublimely fogged-in worlds inspired by the sort of science fiction that deals in the eerily heart-rending. Consequently, her music takes listeners deep into emotional, dream like journeys, where feedback, error and accidental programming play with layered intentional melody, field recordings and vocals.
Castillo’s music works in concert with her tech heavy multidisciplinary projects – audiovisual performances, object creation, installations and interactive works. Her 2014 album Isolarios, featuring her own cover art, emerged from an artistic and personal generative, mnemonic process unsurprisingly suited to a career artist. Her synths come on in washes and blips, she makes melodies that growl or float, building in movements evocative of a non-traditional classical music textured in electroacoustic noise. Live at MUTEK, Castillo will employ motors and mechanisms, pedals and processors, alongside curated samples and audiovisual machines of her own devising.
Laura Luna is a 2016 participant of the SHAPE platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, which is supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
Presented in collaboration with Meetfactory.