Riff (negro) - Arturo Corrales International Festival of Contemporary Music Warsaw Autumn

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The play features the electric guitar as I dream of it: using a big, fat distortion, as well as the haunting and percussive rhythms of rock and metal. The electronics also produce a sonority that builds a second kind of distorted, alternative and virtual electric guitar that enters into dialogue—and struggle—with the real one. 

The duel and exchange of these two instruments will produce an obsessive and crude play, where metal-like riffs, phrases, and clichés invade contemporary music. As in other recent pieces of mine, electronics will be treated as another real instrument in the band, and the aim of programming is to give an interface that can be played and interpreted with the same freedom as the instruments. 

The “lyrics” of the music—and the pitches of the guitar—come from a monologue in the movie The Network (1976), in which the fateful words of a sinister businessman become unfortunately prophetical for our time: “We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies ... The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business ... It has been since man crawled out of the slime.” 

Arturo Corrales