CANTO - onda - ONDA - canto

In Galician orally transmitted music, sung pieces are structured as a sequence of verses (coplas) that do not necessarily share a thematic connection. What binds them is the place of their emergence—the social and emotional life of a specific village. Between verses, abstract vocal refrains appear—variations of “aialalalá” or “aialelo aialalelo.” These non-lexical sounds make fragmentation operative: rather than memorizing a three-minute song, singers learn clusters of short, self-contained chants lasting only a few seconds.

Such refrains are part of the sonic fabric of the Galician language. They carry no semantic meaning beyond their own resonance and cannot be translated. Yet they remain unmistakably Galician. How does this identification between community and sound arise? And how might these marginal, non-semantic forms generate resistance within a minoritized language in friction with the dominant Spanish?

This performance centers on these abstract refrains—“ailalaes”—extracted from archival field recordings. I separate them from the narrative body of the verses, focusing solely on their sonic presence. The material is processed through Pure Data, which reorganizes the chants into irregular, generative patterns. Their timing and recurrence are partially automated, producing a shifting structure that I cannot fully predict.

Within this system, my role is to listen and respond. I echo the recorded voices, aligning my breath and rhythm with theirs. Percussive gestures on the tambourine punctuate the intervals, recalling traditional transitions while recontextualizing them in a contemporary frame. Over 10–20 minutes, the piece unfolds as a layered dialogue between archival recordings and live voice, past and present. The work foregrounds repetition as a method of learning and embodiment, staging transmission not as preservation of fixed meaning but as the ongoing reactivation of sound within a living, vulnerable language.