Fredy Vallejos

Memoria(S) No. 1 is a commission by Alexander Duque and GIMPAS (Research Group on Music from the Colombian South Pacific). The composition is part of the work the composer has been developing within the framework of the NEST project, on musical notation and its consequences for performance. Thus, in certain circumstances, musical notation can result in the fragmentation of the senses by dividing the musical experience between vision and hearing. Digital technology renews its multi-sensoriality and therefore poses new challenges in terms of the application of these tools.

Relative Patterns No. 8 is the second work resulting from the mathematical modeling of Toques de Batá (in this case, Eleguá). The model is also used to control the automated editing of the video using a Max-MSP algorithm, thus generating—in addition to a sonic polyrhythm—an audiovisual polyrhythm that accentuates the cyclical (nonlinear) nature of the sonic discourse.

This is an electronic version of the piece originally written for chonta marimba, Pacific drums, electronics, and video.

Composition, video, and programming: Fredy Vallejos

Image: Carlos Rodríguez

IT assistance and mastering: David Barberán

Voice: Yeiner Orobio

Virtual instruments: Wellenkraft Sound Creation

The composition process for this work developed from sketches made during the workshop I led for the Master's program in Contemporary Music Performance at ICTUS and SPECTRA, in collaboration with the research studios of the P.A.R.T.S. Dance School (Belgium). In these sketches, each instrumental part is represented by a dancer, generating a divergent, convergent, and vice versa process, evolving from simple homophony to complex polyphony based on the formalization and modeling of traditional African-American music. To accentuate this polyphony, temporal overlays were added, taking advantage of the capabilities of the Polytempo Network program and creating a kind of diffuse polymetry. In this way, each part is individual, yet inserted into a calculated macroprocess, comparable to the architecture of Inca culture, in which a (seemingly chaotic) macrostructure is composed of heterogeneous and contrasting parts.

This video is an extract from the final part of the work without its performance component. Through different texts (Guambo: Andean Nuclear Spring, Lema: Ñuka hatunmamata pachaka imata kan nishpa tapukpika, BIPM: The International System of Units), the work explores the concept of identity, from Time as a transversal axis of reflection, and of sound as a temporary phenomenon par excellence.

TEMPUS / PACHA then plays with the limits between a discursive and cyclical temporality. Between a narration and a kind of ritual performance where the flow of existence gives way to a continuous present, to a diffuse temporality accentuated by the multiplicity of sensory experiences of the proposal.

Improvisations - Piano / Laptop (excerpts)

Piano: Holman Alvarez

Laptop and digital percussions: Fredy Vallejos

Recorded live on May 1, 2019 in * matik-matik * by Benjamin Calais

Bogota (Colombia)

Vórtice en Suspensión is the fruit of a rhythmical analysis of traditional music of oral Afro-Colombian origin. The material will be used to construct a mechanism originating in the opposition of contrasting timbres which evolve and attain a complex polyrhythm –calculated entirely which the aid of Open Music– and also an almost imperceptible transformation of the durations which make up that polyrhythm. The result follows a process of vague periodicity by way of complex polyrhythms which remain ever mobile.

Improvisation - Cercles 2b

Live Recording

Festival Ecuatoriano de música contemporánea

Teatro Variedades 

Quito - Ecuador

Septiembre 2017

Suicide in Guayas (IGM - 015), the new album by composers Susan Campos-Fonseca and Fredy Vallejos, was presented in Guayaquil Ecuador on June 23, 2017, during the II Encuentro Internacional de Arte organized by the Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigación en Arte (Universidad de las Artes, Ecuador). The presentation was at the Museo Antropológico de Arte Contemporáneo - MAAC, in sound installation format. Campos-Fonseca, Vallejos, and Arsenio Cadena from the production team were present, accompanied by art curator Norberto Bayo Mestre.

www.irreverencegroupmusic.com/

available on iTunes

The Variations evolve around a concept for which I have had a certain affection for sometime, i.e. what Grisey calls "hazy periodicity". The title of the piece refers to a specific type of writing. The  Variations correspond to 4 processes, all based on a pool of rhythmical, frequential and dynamic patterns while the 7 lines are connected to the number of beats (virtual or not) in the patterns.

It follows therefore that all the material stems from the structuring of time values of Afro-Colombian music of the oral tradition. The formal conception of time remains however different: it evolves around cyclic, linear or discontinuous directionality and the role of the beat in the perception of the different polyphonic strata.

"As a percussionist he works on very elaborate structures by way of computer-assisted composition (Openmusic).He has developed for IN VIVO DANSE a rhythmical sound spiral: rhythms, emerging from a texture, intermingle and vary imperceptibly. Together with Thomas he has worked a lot on signal systems and pre-signals in order to find bearings within the spiral. Thomas organised a battle of solos in which each dancer is connected to a rhythmical stratum. When the stratum moves towards a unison, every dancer also moves towards that unison."

Conversation with Thierry de Mey

In "Mouvement" 20/07/2012

Dedicated to my brother, Camilo, Divergence/Convergence is a 'perpetual variation' in which I attempt to exploit three types of time perception. In the first part the listener fixes on the instantaneous. Focus is given to timbre and material, and consequently time becomes static. The second part juxtaposes sound objects which although they are contrasting, retain a musical direction. The result is a time-oriented and not a linear direction. However the third and last part highlights the actual writing impetus of the piece, i.e. the variation. Thus the development of the musical discourse results in a type of temporality which could be called linear orientation. The title of the piece suggests not only a process of progressive transformation going from one object to another, but also the opposition of different types of writing.