Fernando Garnero (b. 1976, Rosario) is an Argentine composer, researcher, and multimedia artist of the European musical avant-garde. His work explores relationships between acoustic instruments, electronics and digital technologies in contemporary composition. A graduate of Buenos Aires institutions, Éric Gaudibert and Ivan Fedele's studios, the IRCAM Cursus program, and holder of a PhD from Lund University, Garnero is also the co-founder of the Geneva-based Ensemble Vortex and a former Fellow at the Villa Medici. His music is commissioned by Radio France and the Teatro Colón, with performances spanning major festivals from the Venice Biennale to Warsaw Autumn.

For the "Oecumene" column of the Time to Hear almanac, researcher Daria Lutsenko had a conversation with the composer to discuss creating art within diverse cultural contexts. Their dialogue explores Garnero's career path, his creative methodology, and the role of contemporary music within a cross-disciplinary landscape. Parallel to these themes, the conversation delves into national identity, interactions between non-European traditions and the avant-garde, and the expanding boundaries in contemporary art.

The column of almanac is titled "Oecumene" - the inhabited world, where we write about non-european music culture. You were born in Argentina, studied and work in Europe (specifically in Switzerland and France), and your music is performed across the globe. If you don't mind, for beginning i want to ask some questions about your life story and education. You were born in Rosario in Argentina. Do you have a musical portrait of city and your life there? Maybe some memories or fixed sounds?

I was born in Rosario, but I only lived there for a couple of months, so my Rosario is mostly the city of my childhood holidays, particularly the area around my grandmother’s house. The city has changed enormously since then, of course. What remains in my memory is a rather strange mixture of urban sounds and a kind of silence that felt more rural than metropolitan.

I remember the boredom of the siesta, in temperatures approaching forty degrees, suddenly interrupted by the soft overtones of the chiflo — a small panpipe-like instrument used by street vendors riding their bicycles. I remember children playing with water to escape the heat, a car passing somewhere far away, flocks of birds, women talking on the pavement. There was the incessant but very localized call of the tero , contrasting with the Doppler effect of ambulance sirens passing along the avenue two blocks from my grandmother’s house. There was the static of a neighbour’s transistor radio, trains in the distance, crickets at night. A football stadium full of people shouting; a swimming pool with seemingly more people than water, and certainly more noise than stillness. And the endless games in my grandmother’s courtyard, with the sound of the old television coming from inside the house while the adults watched Poirot.

Curiously, some of these memories are not strictly sonic. I also remember the last fireflies I ever saw there. Sound, image, heat, boredom, distance and childhood are difficult to separate in memory.

What fascinates me now is that all these sounds seem to belong together, but I cannot really say what they belong to. I remember particular listening points, different periodicities and accidents, sounds appearing at different distances. They seem to suggest some underlying logos connecting them, although that logos probably never existed. Perhaps memory itself produces that temptation.

Firstly you studied in Buenos Aires and then moved to Switzerland. Do you have some music portraits of these cities and maybe some linked with this places things that you use in your work today?

I don’t think I have musical portraits of Buenos Aires and Geneva in the same way I have one of Rosario. Perhaps because I still return to both cities quite often, it would feel artificial to reconstruct them now as two soundscapes and then try to explain my music through them.

What I remember much more clearly are ways of moving through these places. In Buenos Aires, a large part of my musical education happened outside formal studies. I spent an enormous amount of time going to concerts and wandering around the city looking for records and scores, and then listening to the recordings while following the scores. I was listening to very different kinds of music at the same time, and my education was probably much less coherent than I imagined it to be then.

Moving to Switzerland intensified rather than resolved that multiplicity. I arrived in Geneva wanting to study early music and composition simultaneously. For some years I moved between harpsichord, basso continuo and historical notation on one side, and contemporary composition on the other; later I began experimenting with electronic music and algorithmic approaches. Eventually I had to give up early music simply because I could not do everything.

Those movements certainly changed me, but I would have a hard time saying exactly how. Cities accumulate enormous affective intensities, particularly when you move between them. Some of that inevitably enters the work, but trying to identify it afterwards as a particular sound, influence or aesthetic trait would probably tell a story that is much neater than the experience itself. Experience is always more chaotic, and ultimately irreducible to the narratives we construct around it.

You studied Renaissance and Baroque music theory at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève, but your music sounds very industrial and modern. How did early music influence your compositions? How do you feel about composing in XXI century - what it is like for you?

My experience with early music was very important to me, but probably not in the sense of an influence that I could easily identify in my music today. I was quite young, and for some years I was really immersed in a different regime of musical production. I studied harpsichord, basso continuo, counterpoint and historical notation, and became fascinated by things such as isorhythmic motets, the Ars subtilior and prolation canons.

Part of the fascination was certainly intellectual. These musics offered extraordinarily sophisticated ways of thinking and codifying musical time. But it was also very physical and affective: the vibration of voices in polyphony, and the very sensual pleasure of experiencing contrapuntal logic unfolding from within, through singing or playing. I think those experiences displaced some of my musical desires at a crucial moment in my life.

Basso continuo, ornamentation and improvised counterpoint also gave me a very particular experience of the relationship between writing and performance: one in which the written symbol does not contain its complete realisation. Looking back, I can perhaps recognise there an early sensitivity to something that would concern me much later: the unstable relationship between a symbol, the operations through which it is decoded, and the sound that eventually emerges. That relationship already seemed less stable and self-evident than I might have assumed. I wouldn’t say that this is where my later interest in translation or transduction (as an artistic method) “comes from” — too many other things happened in between — but it probably left a certain attunement.

All of this became entangled with so many other experiences that trying to isolate its influence on what I compose today would be almost impossible — and, more importantly, I’m not sure it would be a very useful exercise.

Later you explored twentieth-century musical aesthetics and computer-assisted composition in Basel, in Strasbourg and IRCAM’s Cursus program. Was it a new era in your composer's life when you started to explore electronic sound and what metamorphoses in your work did you go through?

Of course it changed my work profoundly! I’m not even sure when that process began, but I know it took a long time. So I find it difficult to identify a particular moment when electronic music suddenly opened a “new era” for me. It was much more gradual and messy than that.

What changed is much harder to summarize. My experience of musical time certainly changed, as did my understanding of the complexity and non-linearity of sound itself. But perhaps I can describe it more simply through a sensation. I can remember the pleasure of singing a motet and feeling the beating produced by a harmonic suspension slowly dissolve into an almost celestial consonance. Years later, I could experience a strangely similar pleasure listening to a moving cluster of oscillators. They are obviously very different things, but in both cases there is something that fascinates me in the encounter between a very concrete sensory experience and an intelligible process unfolding through it.

In the end, I think I am often looking for those moments of magic, when something that remains irreducible to words coexists with an intentionally constructed process — a kind of deliberate alchemy.

In addition to your work as a composer, you are one of the founders and later artistic co-director of the Vortex Ensemble, based in Geneva, which brings together instrumentalists and composers who have contributed to contemporary artistic production. What was your intention in founding the ensemble, specializing in contemporary music? How did it all begin?

Vortex started more than twenty years ago with a rather heterogeneous group of people — from different countries and musical backgrounds — who met at the Geneva Conservatory, now the HEM (Haute école de musique). At the beginning, I think our intentions were quite simple: we wanted to create a collaborative workshop where composers and performers could make music together, experiment, and develop projects outside the existing production structures. I’m not sure we understood at the time what such a space could become.

Over the years, the boundaries became increasingly porous. Composition, performance, improvisation, sound creation, electronics and music theatre began to overlap, and sometimes it became difficult to say exactly where composition ended and interpretation began. But making things together also meant programming concerts, finding money, organising, communicating, building devices, moving loudspeakers, inviting artists, inventing formats — and discussing, endlessly. In other words, we ended up sharing an enormous amount of time.

Looking back, perhaps that shared time is more important to me than whatever our original intention was. Ways of playing, composing and listening contaminated one another; ideas circulated; instruments and technologies were adapted, diverted or bricolaged. In the process, affects and desires also shifted, and Vortex gradually became something quite different from what we could have imagined when we started. After more than twenty years, none of us plays, composes or listens exactly as we would have without the others.

In May 2025, you defended your doctoral dissertation “Mutations in the Composable: Compositional Practice as a Space of Experimentation, Tension, and Uncertainty“ at Lund University. The central thesis of your PhD introduces «composable spaces» as multi-level fields where objects and operations interact. How do you practically operate within this space during the compositional process? Furthermore, what constitutes the fundamental sonic materiality of your work, and through what mechanisms do these materials mutate and interact across different media?

First, I should clarify that the term “composable space” comes from Horacio Vaggione. What interested me in the concept was that it described something I had increasingly experienced in my own practice: when I compose, I am not simply organising sounds within a pre-existing space. Part of the work consists in constructing the space in which those sounds, operations and relationships can appear in the first place.

Campo amniótico (amniotic field), for example, developed through experiments with self-regulated feedback systems coupling microphones with acoustic instruments. Changing a level, modifying the position of the hybrid instrument or the action of the performer could transform the behaviour of the whole system. So the material was not simply something I operated on; it was also telling me what operations were possible. The piece gradually emerged through this back and forth between an abstract idea, the physical behaviour of the system, my listening, and the performers’ own embodied knowledge.

This also happens between different media. An operation conceived in one domain can migrate into another — from electronic sound processing to instrumental writing, for instance — but it never arrives unchanged. Something is lost, something resists, and something else becomes possible. A large part of what I call composition happens for me in those translations.

Your composable space operates precisely within the tension between control and contingency. What degree of agency does the performer actually possess in this flux? Do they act as an active agent executing «operations» to reshape the field, or do they ultimately function as an «object» carefully configured within your predefined matrix?

I would probably be careful about generalising this into a single model of performer agency. In the dissertation, I discuss this question quite specifically in relation to Campo amniótico, because the self-regulated feedback system created a very particular situation. Its behaviour could never be completely predicted, so the performer could not simply execute a sequence of predefined actions and expect a predetermined sonic result.

What interested me there was the negotiation that emerged between performer and system. The performers had to use their instrumental and bodily knowledge, but also remain extremely attentive to what the system was doing at that particular moment and in that particular space. Their actions affected the feedback, while the behaviour of the feedback continuously affected their actions in return. So I would find it difficult to describe the performer either as a completely autonomous agent or as an object configured within a predefined matrix. Agency, in that particular piece, emerged through the interaction.

But this can be very different from one piece to another. Sometimes I write extremely precise actions; elsewhere the performer has considerable freedom, or their knowledge becomes part of the process through which the work itself is developed. I’m interested in the tension between control and contingency, certainly, but I don’t think there is an ideal amount of either, or a single role that I want performers to occupy. It depends very much on what a particular work makes possible — or requires.

The history of music offers various models of “open form” – works by Stockhausen, Boulez and Berio – while in philosophy, similar ideas emerged through the work of Foucault and Derrida. In a subsequent unfinished draft, you briefly refer to Gödel and Lacan while beginning to explore the notion of incompleteness. How do you place the notion of “composable space” in relation to these different approaches, and how does incompleteness enter into your own conceptual framework?

I would distinguish incompleteness from the historical notion of open form. What interests me in Gödel and Lacan —and this is still a very preliminary line of thought— is not the possibility of leaving a work formally open, but the idea that no system can completely account for or close itself from within. In relation to composition, I am interested in what this might mean for processes of discovery: the possibility that something can emerge through the compositional process that was not entirely contained in its initial premises.

“Composable space,” on the other hand, is a notion I take from Horacio Vaggione. I use it to think about the heterogeneous field in which compositional operations take place: materials, representations, tools, temporal scales, performers, technologies, and the relations established between them. For me, this space is not a fixed model that precedes the work. It is constructed and transformed through the process itself, and its configuration changes from one project to another.

This is perhaps where I can see a possible connection with the question of incompleteness. A composable space cannot be completely determined in advance without losing precisely its capacity to produce something unforeseen. But I would be cautious about turning this into a unified theoretical framework. At this stage, Gödel and Lacan are references through which I am beginning to think about this problem, rather than foundations from which my compositional practice derives.

In your PhD, Horacio Vaggione’s notion of “composable space” plays an important role in your reflection on composition, particularly in relation to his multi-scale approach. How do you appropriate and develop this notion within your own compositional practice, and what does “composable space” allow you to think about the compositional process?

I borrow the notion of “composable space” directly from Horacio Vaggione. I first encountered it in relation to his work on multiple time scales, understood not simply as different levels at which musical phenomena can be described, but as interacting domains: operations at one scale can affect the possibilities that emerge at another.

Over time, I began to use “composable space” more broadly in my own practice. For me, it designates the heterogeneous network of relations that composition progressively constructs between sounds, symbolic representations, technical objects, instruments, performers, operations, and different scales of musical time. This became particularly useful for thinking about mixed and electronic composition, where these heterogeneous elements cannot easily be reduced to a single level or medium.

What interests me most in the notion is that this space is not entirely given in advance. It is progressively constructed through the compositional process itself, as relations are established, tested, transformed, or abandoned. In that sense, it allows me to think of composition less as the realization of a pre-existing formal model than as the construction of a space in which certain musical possibilities can emerge. Physical space can of course become an important dimension of this process—as happens, for instance, in some of my works with feedback—but it remains one dimension among others rather than the primary medium being composed.

Towards the end of your dissertation, you begin to formulate the idea of “phonobiography” as a way of thinking about sonic memory and the biographical traces carried by sounds. How are you beginning to develop this idea in your compositional practice, and what kinds of relationships between memory, recorded sound and composition does it open up for you?

What interests me in the idea of “phonobiography” is that sonic memory is not simply an archive of sounds that we consciously preserve. It is made of fragments, traces and associations whose significance can change over time, and which can reappear in unexpected contexts. In that sense, I am interested in how composition can work with sounds not only as material, but also as carriers of memory, experience and affect.

I am still exploring what this might mean in practice, so I would hesitate to call phonobiography a method. It is closer, for the moment, to a way of asking questions about the relation between listening, memory and composition. A recorded sound can be displaced, transformed or placed in relation to other materials until its original context becomes unstable, while some trace of recognition may nevertheless remain. I find this oscillation between recognition and abstraction particularly fertile.

Memoria de pajarito is perhaps a good recent example. The project began by superimposing cartographies of very different forms of migration: those of birds and those of seasonal agricultural workers. What interested me was not an analogy between them, but precisely their heterogeneity. These movements are shaped by radically different kinds of determination — biological in one case, social, economic and political in the other — and the violence involved in them is obviously of a very different nature. The piece draws on field recordings, archival materials, human voices, bird calls and other sonic traces connected in different ways to these trajectories, bringing them into the same compositional field without making them equivalent.

The operations I use with these materials do not follow a general protocol. A large part of the process consists in listening to a particular sample and exploring what its morphology, history or degree of recognisability might suggest. The material partly determines the operations I can imagine, while those operations reveal possibilities in the material that I could not necessarily anticipate. This is why I find it difficult to separate technical and semantic dimensions: transforming the morphology of a source also transforms the ways in which it can signify.

In Memoria de pajarito, the degree of recognisability of the source became a compositional parameter in itself. One central process dynamically changes the playback speed of samples and of an extended field recording. Its overall trajectory moves from extremely slow to very fast reading speeds, while its local behaviour is continuously disturbed by LFOs and random variations. I initially imagined this through the analogy of an old, deteriorated photograph: an image whose grain and deformation make it difficult to read, until at some point the original image becomes perceptible again. In the piece, however, that trajectory is deliberately masked and interrupted, so recognition never becomes a simple linear process of revelation.

This is one reason why I tend to think of these operations as forms of sonic translation rather than simply sound processing. Translation raises the question of what happens to a source through transformation: what persists, what disappears, and what unexpectedly emerges. Meaning is not something I attach to the material after composing it; it participates in the compositional decisions themselves, while remaining unstable enough to be transformed by them. In this sense, phonobiography is still less a defined procedure than a way of following how sonic traces acquire, lose and transform meaning through composition.

Moving to your projects, from 2020 to 2021, you were a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome, where you led the project Musique au-delà du Son (Music Beyond Sound). This project furthered your exploration of assembling and manipulating complex sound objects, recontextualizing them constantly through a series of audiovisual, mixed, and performative works.

In your doctoral research, you deeply investigate physical material resistance and electroacoustic feedback. Could the cultural objects and historical remnants you deployed in 'Musique au-delà du son' be understood as a form of feedback - a resistance operating within the mental and conceptual field rather than the purely acoustic one?

When I developed Musique au-delà du son at Villa Medici in 2020, I was particularly interested in working with already existing cultural objects — recordings, images, fragments, historical traces — and in what happened when they were extracted from one context and inserted into another. I was interested in sampling, montage, recontextualisation, and in constructing situations in which these heterogeneous materials could affect one another.

These materials were never neutral to me. A large part of composing with them consisted in listening to what kinds of operations they could sustain, and in exploring how far I could transform them while something of their previous context remained perceptible. Sometimes I wanted that trace to persist; sometimes I was interested in the precise moment when recognition began to dissolve and the material started to behave as something else. So the negotiation was not simply between a concept and a resistant material, but between different degrees of recognition, transformation and abstraction. The compositional possibilities often emerged precisely while moving across those thresholds.

In that sense, I think your analogy with feedback can be productive, although I would understand it less as a form of resistance than as something that returns from the material and affects the compositional process. A cultural object never enters a new context empty-handed: even after considerable manipulation, some of its previous associations, histories or perceptual traces may persist, disappear and unexpectedly reappear. And those traces can begin to interfere with the operation I thought I was performing. Perhaps this is where the analogy with feedback becomes interesting to me: the transformation is never entirely one-directional. I act upon the material, but what emerges through that transformation also acts back upon the way I listen, interpret it, and decide what to do next.

Focusing on the performative aspect of your Villa Medici project: how do you navigate the tension between strict algorithmic structure - often associated with IRCAM - and genuine performative contingency or unexpected outcomes? How is this balance distributed and negotiated in real-time performance?

I’m not sure I would draw the opposition in quite those terms. I would hesitate to associate IRCAM with a single lineage of strict algorithmic structure, and in my own work algorithmic procedures have only been one tool among many. More importantly, I don’t necessarily see precise or deterministic procedures and contingency as opposite poles.

In some works from this period, I could establish an extremely precise procedure — selecting, cutting, looping, synchronising or spatialising material according to a predetermined rule — without being able to predict completely what the resulting experience would be. The procedure may be deterministic while the relationships it produces, and particularly the way they are perceived, are much less so. Sometimes very simple rules generate surprisingly complex situations.

So I don’t think of this as distributing a certain percentage of control and another percentage of chaos. What interests me is constructing situations in which different degrees of determination can interact with things that cannot be completely anticipated. Depending on the work, this may involve a performer, a technical system, a particular acoustic or spatial situation, or simply the perceptual consequences of putting heterogeneous elements together. Real-time performance is therefore only one possible site of that negotiation. The negotiation happens inside those interactions rather than between two clearly separated domains.

If the project fundamentally moves “beyond sound“ (au-delà du son), what constitutes the primary medium for the audience? Does the work ultimately reside in the visual image, the physical gesture of the performer, or rather in the conceptual awareness of how the cultural object is being mutated? Ultimately, how would you define the ontology of the project itself - what is it as a unified artwork?

The title Musique au-delà du son referred to my interest at that time in approaching sound not only as neutral material for abstract manipulation, but also as a sign, a trace of culture, something already carrying histories, associations and meanings. In that sense, “beyond sound” was metaphorical: it pointed towards what sound could bring with it, rather than towards leaving sound behind in favour of another medium.

This also means that I would have difficulty identifying a primary medium for the audience. During that period I made instrumental and electronic pieces, videos, installations, conceptual works, drawings and graphic experiments, sometimes independently and sometimes in collaboration with other artists. In some works the visual dimension was essential; in others there was almost nothing to see. Sometimes a pre-existing cultural object was immediately recognisable, while elsewhere it could be transformed almost beyond recognition. The relationship between these dimensions had to be constructed differently each time.

And perhaps this makes the question of a unified ontology slightly difficult for me, because Musique au-delà du son was never really a single artwork. It was the name I gave to a broad field of artistic exploration under which I developed a rather heterogeneous constellation of works, experiments and prototypes. Some of them eventually opened paths that I continued exploring much later; others remained isolated experiments. If there was something holding the project together, it was probably less a particular medium or a unified artistic form than a recurring curiosity about what happens when sound is treated as something that can carry, transform and produce relations beyond its purely acoustic properties.

Speaking of cultural contexts and traces that affect our perspective, I would like to shift our focus from your recent projects back to your early formative impressions. There is a clear geopolitical asymmetry between the fragmentation of contemporary music in South America and its institutional weight in Europe. When you first heard the works of Grisey and Sciarrino back in Argentina, how did that aesthetic encounter impact you?

The material asymmetry was certainly real. In Argentina in the 1990s, access to certain scores, recordings, technologies and institutions could be extremely difficult. I remember spending months looking for the scores of Grisey’s Talea and Sciarrino’s Lo spazio inverso, asking around in libraries, talking to contemporary music enthusiasts in Buenos Aires, and asking people who travelled to Europe to bring things back. I even went to a Ricordi music shop in Buenos Aires, which sold scores and instruments, and eventually someone there told me that the easiest way to obtain the scores would simply be to go to Milan. That anecdote probably says quite a lot about how cultural circulation was organised at the time.

But I would be more cautious about describing contemporary music itself as scarce in South America. What was radically unequal were the conditions of access and circulation, and of course those inequalities were not accidental: they were part of a much longer history of how cultural legitimacy, resources and institutions had been distributed between Europe and other parts of the world. At the same time, I had already been fascinated by many other composers, and my musical education in Buenos Aires was extraordinarily heterogeneous. So I would hesitate to turn my encounter with Grisey and Sciarrino into a confrontation between South America and Europe.

Once this music reached me, I don’t remember experiencing it as something that belonged to Europe and that I, as an Argentine composer, was somehow encountering from the outside. I felt perfectly entitled to enter it, misunderstand it, appropriate it, transform it, or connect it with anything else I was listening to. Talea and Lo spazio inverso certainly had a profound impact on me, but they entered a musical imagination that was already populated by many other things. I think there is an important distinction here: acknowledging that what has presented itself as “universal” has often been constructed and imposed through very concrete relations of power does not mean accepting that cultural objects remain the property of the places from which they historically acquired their authority. The routes through which this music reached me were profoundly unequal; the possibilities of what I could do with it were not.

Walter Mignolo’s concept of “epistemic disobedience” proposes a critique of dominant structures of knowledge and their geopolitical hierarchies. How did encountering Mignolo’s ideas affect the way you think about your own position as a composer and researcher? Did they provide you with new ways of understanding the institutional and epistemological conditions in which artistic practices and knowledge circulate?

I encountered Mignolo relatively late, so I would not describe his work as a point of departure for my practice. What it gave me was a vocabulary for thinking more explicitly about experiences and asymmetries that I had already encountered, particularly in relation to institutions, education, and the circulation and legitimisation of knowledge.

As an Argentine composer who studied and later worked within European institutions, I have certainly experienced the asymmetries involved in deciding where legitimate knowledge is supposedly produced, which techniques are considered authoritative, and from where one is expected to speak. Becoming more conscious of my own position within those asymmetries was actually quite empowering. It changed my relationship to the traditions in which I had been trained: I could approach them less as bodies of knowledge whose authority had to be inherited, and more as materials that I was free to appropriate, question, contaminate and reconfigure.

Mignolo’s notion of epistemic disobedience helped me articulate this tension more clearly. For me, its interest lies less in rejecting particular traditions than in questioning the hierarchies through which some forms of knowledge become naturalised as universal while others remain marked by their geographical or cultural origin. At the same time, I have always felt slightly uncomfortable with being identified first as an “Argentine” or “Latin American composer,” rather than simply as a composer. Knowing where I come from does matter to me, but I don’t think it requires me to represent that origin aesthetically. On the contrary, perhaps it gives me greater freedom to move elsewhere. My musical formation is profoundly heterogeneous, even bastardised in some respects, and I increasingly value that condition.

In your collaborative audio article «Midnight Reflections…» with Mauricio Carrasco, you discuss in detail the cultural and institutional expectations placed on Latin American musicians in the Global North. How, in the context of this dialogue, does Tirusha Naidu’s concept of the ‘Northern Ventriloquist’ resonate with your findings? In what ways do the musical strategies in your projects allow you to escape these imposed roles?

Naidu’s notion of the “Northern Ventriloquist” resonated strongly with the conversation Mauricio and I were having because it names a contradiction we both recognised from experience. As musicians from the Global South, much of the technical and conceptual language through which our work became institutionally legible was acquired in Europe. There is something uncomfortable in discovering that even the language available to criticise those hierarchies may partly come from the same institutions and intellectual traditions whose authority one is trying to question.

But in our dialogue, ventriloquism was not only a figure of submission. Learning a language also means acquiring the possibility of misusing it, displacing it and making it say things it was perhaps not expected to say. This is something I increasingly recognise in my own trajectory. I have no interest in recovering some uncontaminated position outside European musical traditions — I’m far too entangled with them for that — but neither do I feel obliged to reproduce the authority or the purposes attached to the techniques, concepts and technologies I inherited through them.

I’m less certain, however, that I can translate this reflection directly into particular musical strategies. My compositional methods were not developed as ways of escaping geopolitical or institutional roles, and I would be suspicious of retrospectively assigning them that function. The relationship is probably less direct and more contradictory. The same techniques, technologies and conceptual tools through which I developed my practice are themselves part of the histories and institutions we were questioning in the article. What matters to me is perhaps what one can do from within that entanglement: how inherited tools can be used without necessarily inheriting all the positions, values or forms of authority that accompanied them. But I would prefer to leave that relationship somewhat unresolved rather than turn a political question into a convenient explanation of my music.

Do you perceive echoes of a Latin American identity in your compositional perspective, or is new music for you a supranational, global language that erases all boundaries? How do the European rational avant-garde and non-European (South American) archaic elements - as well as their associated mentalities or perceptions of time - coexist in your work?

I’m not sure I experience these elements as belonging to such clearly separated worlds. My musical formation has always been extremely heterogeneous, and I would find it difficult to decide which parts of it should count as European, Latin American, rational, archaic or global. I grew up in Argentina listening to and playing very different kinds of music, and later studied early music, contemporary composition, electronics and computer-assisted composition in Europe. All of these experiences became entangled long before I could have organised them into coherent cultural categories.

This does not mean that geography, history or cultural identity are irrelevant to me. As I mentioned before, becoming more conscious of the peripheral position from which I encountered certain musical traditions has changed the way I relate to them. But I don’t experience this as a need to balance a European element against a South American one inside the music. Nor do I think that South America represents an archaic temporality opposed to a rational European modernity. Both categories contain far too many different histories, practices and temporalities for that opposition to be very useful to me.

Perhaps what interests me more is what can happen when heterogeneous materials, techniques and temporalities coexist without necessarily having to represent stable cultural identities. A frog recorded in South America, a technique derived from digital signal processing, a contrapuntal procedure, a fragment of speech or an instrumental gesture can enter the same compositional process without each of them having to stand for the culture from which it came. Their histories do not disappear, but neither do they completely determine what these materials can become.