Julio d'Escriván:
...a selection of my
electroacoustic/electronic music
with some commentary

These are mostly composer 'demos' so that if you are interested you can have a listen to an mp3 of my music. Full quality live versions of some may be available on CD, or soon will be !

If you would like to contact me then just write to: julio@bitbongo.com


Sueño con ranitas 2006 is a piece written for marimba player Daniela Ganeva. The piece was written after my return from Caracas in July 2006, where I heard the sound of frogs singing again. This is a prominent feature of the night soundscape of my home city. I had made some recordings of Daniela playing various things on the marimba and proceeded to mangle those in order to recreate imaginary frog singing through granulations and rhythmic objects found within the samples. The characteristic twittering sound of the frogs is something I miss very much in England, I have not heard anything like it at this latitude
Apart from the Marimba, it also uses tam-tam, thai cymbals and crotales as well as a Max/MSP/Jitter custom cue player and video trigger. Daniela is also able to control spatialisation in performance through accelerometers taped to her hands.


It was premiered at the Birmingham Conservatoire in october 2006 as part of Daniela's concert there for the percussive arts society. It was then performed by her at PASIC in Austin,Texas; the Cambridge Festival, West Road Concert Hall, UK; the Paris Conservatoire and other venues in England and Wales. This is just my midi demo and before long we should be recording it properly with Daniela for an upcoming CD. For the same concert I made this short 'warm-up piece' called juguete (2006)












juguete is not electronic but as they go together in concert, I have included the midi demo here The samples are all from Daniela's playing and the marimba sampler instrument was built by me on three layers of dynamics taken from each note of her five octave instrument.








Recuerdos del Alambre 2005 is a piece written for theorbo player Rubén Riera. The name of this piece pokes fun at Tárrega's famous tremolando study for the guitar, but has nothing to do with it! the word 'alambre', which means 'wire', is meant to give an idea of electricity. Combining this ancient instrument with transformed versions of itself was an interesting exercise. All the soundfiles, which are cued live by the performer, are derived from recordings of Rubén playing baroque 'standards' ;) He has already recorded this for an upcoming cd, and I have posted here the mp3 of my midi demo, which is not as good as his performance -demos never are!- but it's always interesting to see what the composer intends (however misguided) in terms of tempo and expression.


Noronquí 2003 was written for Damien Royannais, Soprano Sax, and Paul Jackson, piano. Noronquí is an island from the Venezuelan archipelago of 'Los Roques', north of Carracas in the Caribbean sea. Before coming to England, I stayed there invited by my very good friends David and Joe, who paid all expenses for me and Milly to come and stay on David's sailboat for three days as a way of saying goodbye to Venezuela. We anchored at the small island of Noronquí which means 'northern key' in pigeon English. The islands were alternatively in the hands of british buccaneers, french and dutch pirates. We did lots of diving and came close to a perilous barracuda which in the end did not attack. We were subsequently rewarded by a huge turtle swimming by, as if flying. The coral reef was gorgeous and I will not easily forget the white sands and transparent light blue water. It must be the most beautiful place in the world... At the time I was listening to the Debussy preludes over and over again, so I decided to take melodic material derived from l'isle Joyeaux and sample a playing of the piece itself. From here I derived all the electronic material which I gave to the pianist in the form of a pedal cue-player -made with Max/MSP- so he could pedal it from the piano (apparently this is hard work!) Paul and Damien did a wonderful job, they performed it for a lunchtime concert in Cambridge at the Mumford Theatre and then recorded it as part of a CD which should be available soon and bears the name of my piece.


Hoketus Creole 2002 was written at the request of Venezuelan Folk Group Ensemble Gurrufío for the Camerata Criolla de Caracas. It involves three 'carrizos' players; a pan flute from the Venezuelan Amazon. Members of the ensemble played as part of the chamber orchestra. Luis Julio Toro and Jaime Martínez, both virtuoso woodwind players performed their carrizos, together with Alex Livinalli, a percussionist and multiinstrumentalist. I controlled the laptop cueing on stage, and we did this at the Teatro Teresa Carreño in Caracas. I think it was sometime during 2002. This is a live recording of that first and only performance! the audience loved it and we had a full house! unfortunately it is a typical Venezuelan phenomenon that works of this type get commissioned and then performed once before the transient memory of our people gets focused on some survival issue or another (who can blame them?). I made the electronic cues from recordings of Luis Julio playing the pan flutes during our 'Cantos y Tonadas' project. I also included sounds from various amazonian places as part of the sampled ambience and material for transformations. The live flutes have to play antiphonally, in a call and response fashion, as no one flute contains the whole scale. This makes for a very exciting performance as the players need to rhythmically sync with each other and the orchestra.

4 Granulaciones 2002 were experiments in trying to make something out of the countless advert music pieces I have written over the years to earn my living as a 'music for media' composer. As part of an ongoing project, I am recycling my music for ads in remixes that use granular synthesis to try and 'freeze' the time of the ad, usually a thirty second piece, which is practically disposable. After being an active 'concert' music written in the late 80s and early 90s Iturned to commercials as they offered the kind of income that could allow a musician in Caracas to live quite decently. I know this time was not wasted but apart from occasional pieces during those years, my extensive output of tv/radio spots, assorted film music, documentaries and branding projects are largely confined to the images for which they were commissioned. As is the case in that job, the style and form of most of the music was determined by my clients. So... for this reason, I decided to reconstruct those sounds and sources into my own pieces, devoid of commercial association and entirely structured by my taste and not by somebody else's brief. This is now poetic justice ;)

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