Totem Series Residency Concert

LIVE: Rodrigo Ambriz | Angélica Castelló

Since June 2024, the evolving installation, Totem from Angélica Castelló has found a home in Setzkasten. To celebrate this special project, we’re launching a mini-series dedicated to exploring the relationship between sound, machines, making keen with them and their energy.
For the first of these intimate concerts, Angélica will be performing in duo with the extraordinary voice artist from Mexico, Rodrigo Ambriz.
They will play a duo or maybe in orchestra with machines, cables, electricity, radios, tapes…. and we hope that some spirits will join in sound.

Rodrigo Ambriz
Vocal artist and magnetic tape manipulator. His work addresses the cathartic and plastic properties of phonation, the dislocation of meaning, prelinguistic pleasures and scream as statement and crack. From 2008 to date he is known in the context of experimental music orbiting México City for his wide range of extended vocal techniques and his peculiar magnetic tape processes that he often nicknames low-budget electroacoustics. His practice has led him to move through contexts and languages ranging from the interpretation of contemporary pieces, hardcore free improvisation and harsh electronics without properly affiliating with any of these. He has collaborated with characters as divergent as Arthur Henry Fork, Samuel Cedillo, Anne F-Jacques, Chris Corsano, Angélica Castelló, Ute Wassermann, among many others. He constantly participates in the context of butoh dance and with visual artists, both providing sound on stage and executing sound designs for video.

Angélica Castelló -Composer, Sound Artist
Using field recordings, radio and cassette devices together with the extravagant sounds of the paetzold recorder, composer and sound artist Angelica Castelló journeys through the enigmatic land of lost memories, death and traumatic encounters, fragility, dreamworld and the subconscious. Born in Mexico City, Castelló studied classical recorder and composition in Mexico, Canada, Holland and Austria where she currently lives and works.
She Performs continuously solo or in cooperations everywhere between Mexico City and Vienna. Numerous compositions for orchestra, ensembles, fixed media, radio works as well as installations that operate at the interface of music, performance and visual arts. Several releases on labels like Interstellar records, Mikroton recordings, Monotype records, Mosz a.o. http://castello.klingt.org

Angélica Castelló | Totem 1 (begin) | Installation
In my ‚Altares‘ series, worn-out machines come to life, are powered by electricity and enter into a dialog with each other and with my media artifacts. These works are perhaps an homage to iconic works by Cildo Meireles, Nam June Paik and Benoît Maubrey and at the same time inspired by Mexican altar traditions, as well as immersed in a quiet personal narrative.

The totems/altar series evoke an atmosphere of surrealist religion, consumerism, and mourning for waste. This garbage-installations feature radios, cassettes, cables, records, computers, and record players—both old and functional—blending evolution and progress with sound and catharsis. Santisima electricidad!

the Totem series are part of the PEEK research project Spirits in complexity — Making kin with experimental music systems, funded by the Austrian Science Fund [Grant DOI 10.55776/AR821