In the midst of absolute darkness, a spotlight illuminates the face of a young man who sings a melody. From his lungs emerges a Gregorian chant that fills the quarry in which he is located, specifically the one that was used to build the cathedral of Burgos.
The young man who appears is Marc Vilajuana and the one who shines a flashlight on him is Alejandro Narés. Both make up Gregotechnoa duet that mixes Gregorian chant with electronic bases, generating a bridge between the past and the present, between tradition and modernity.
They are both from Barcelona, but they are traveling through Burgos in search of suggestive acoustics, those places where Gregorian chant rises to its maximum expression. And what better than Romanesque and medieval churches, hermitages or cathedrals?
This search is the leitmotiv from the documentary Inaniawhich tells how Gregotechno travels through the corners of emptied Spain to find the echo that connects today with yesterday and fills buildings abandoned years ago. In fact, the title of the film It is a Latin nickname that means ’empty’. “Although the life for which these spaces were designed is no longer there, it does not mean that they are empty. There is always a connection, an interest,” explains Vilajuana in conversation with elDiario.es. And the link in this case is music.
What Gregotechno is looking for is reverberation, which in musical language is “the way sound bounces in a space. Then, we can record that acoustic and use it as a filter in the songs,” explains Narés. “At our concerts, you may be in a nightclub, but what you hear comes from an abandoned Romanesque church,” he adds.
Vilajuana usually looks for these acoustics in the least expected places: from the Barcelona metro to public toilets – “they sound very good,” he says – but Gregotechno has gone one step further. And he has done it hand in hand with Sleeping Beauty. This project, which is dedicated to fighting against the oblivion of emptied Spain, discovered the musicians through Instagram. Vera Herrero is the name behind the initiative and she thought that the two young people could be perfect to embark with her on a trip through Burgos and immortalize the treasures that, due to depopulation, are lost in the undergrowth.
From that collaboration comes Inania, It was presented at the Inedit festival in Barcelona and also won the award for best musical short film. The piece is co-directed by Herrero, Bellas Durmientes and the filmmaker Júlia Girós who, in addition, is video jockey of the group. That is, it projects visual art live during the concerts.
“The documentary is a road movie through creative spaces and processes, all surrounded by the fight against depopulation and oblivion. In the end, looking for acoustics in places that can disappear, means that they do not disappear completely,” reflects Girós.
From bacteria to God
Inania It is a road trip, a trip in time and a trip in search of life. Of what there was and of what remains. “Let’s not fool ourselves, just because there is no human life does not mean there is no life,” says Vilajuana, at the foot of one of these hermitages half destroyed by the passage of time. After this enigmatic statement, the camera focuses on him and Narés kneeling in front of a rock and scraping it with a spatula.
Then, a frame infiltrates the middle of the plot, showing an indefinite, glowing mass. It is the image of one of the microorganisms that resides in these sacred places. The image is courtesy of nanobiotechnologist Xavi Arqué, who seeks visual connections between art and science and magnifies with his microscope what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Arqué is the third part of Gregotechno, which is a duo with Girós. He generates the images and she plays and makes them dance with the music, while projecting them live during the group’s concerts. “They are the visual narrative of each topic and the space in which they have been collected,” summarizes the video jockey.
“In addition to being aesthetically suggestive, the fact that microorganisms react to music or show distinctive features due to being in sacred places opens a whole window to the imagination,” says Herrero.
The art of Gregotechno moves comfortably in metaphor and in uniting worlds that, apparently, have nothing to do with each other. Like science and sacred spaces or Gregorian chant and techno. And all of this is due to a purpose, summarizes Narés: “Open doors to beauty.” The objective is to separate harmonies from the context for which they were intended so that they do not die and anyone can embrace them.
Their way of interpreting music designed for religious contexts desacralizes it, but they assure that their intention is not to “burn everything that has to do with the Church.” In fact, they never deny the ecclesiastical origin of the Gregorian, on the contrary. “We want to bring mass music to a rave and create a new type of liturgy. The liturgy of the body,” they say.
These two young people hesitate when asked if they consider themselves religious and end up opting for a nuanced answer. They believe in a “self-managed religion that serves each one.” “It can be praying or connecting spiritually with music,” they add.
Musicians are capable of deconstricting the Gregorian and playing with it from respect and knowledge. “To get out of something you have to study it well and, once there, decide where you want to take it,” says Vilajuana, who specialized in this type of songs after playing a video game about the Crusades. “I was listening to it in the background and I was very interested,” he remembers today.
The music they offer is born from curiosity. That’s why they went into Burgos to find out where the songs that they play today in clubs like the Sala Apolo in Barcelona were born, where They will hold their first immersive concert on December 18.
“The world of Gregotechno is ancient but modern. It is an electronic paranoia that is mixed with the security of the classic, of what we already know,” explains Júlia Girós. And that duality is perfectly captured in the documentary, which narrates the search of two young people in an almost bucolic way at first and then leads into a psychedelic spiral of raves and microorganisms. “That’s them. They are aesthetics and art. They are chaos and calm. They are duality,” he emphasizes.
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