Osvaldo
Budón

Osvaldo Budóns compositional imagination developed from a »panamerican interest«. Like many Latin American composers of his generation, Budón, born in Argentina in 1965, ended up going to North America after his studies. In Montréal, Canada he intensively explored the possibilities of electroacoustic music, seeking to make connections between electronic and instrumental music and to interweave the most disparate lines of musical traditions.

Within his compositions, Budón wanders agilely among various genres in music history such as North American avant-garde, Latin American classic, pop music, folk, and his own pieces (as in the 8-channel composition Hacia el azul/hacia el rojo [Toward Blue/Toward Red] from 2010), and even between particular timbres of musical tradition. His heterogeneous oeuvre ranges from solo pieces to orchestral works, and frequently seeks to integrate electronic or live-electronic sound synthesis. Now and then individual instruments such as the guitar, a symbol of Latin American music, emerge as the focus of the composition, and the composer ultimately coaxes from the instrument a differentiated and surprisingly new sound spectrum – for instance in 10G (2010/11), a piece for 10 guitars that are not only tuned microtonally but also require a special string set-up. This enables Budón to create a brilliant, floating microtonal polyphony that links traditional timbres with contemporary techniques of composition and interpretation.
As a result of his experiences in North America, Budón ultimately creates an instrumental music characterized by his work with electroacoustic music. However he is not concerned solely with translating digital sound synthesis to instrumental composition, but rather with the attempt to design an interactive weave. Thus works are created in which, for example, digital processes and groups of instruments reciprocally shape each other’s sonic output in real time (Alrededor De Una Música Ausente [All Around an Absent Music] from 2002/03, for three instrumental groups and three digital signal processing stations).
With his return to Latin America, Budón (today a resident of Montevideo, Uruguay) is once again stepping across the borders of American continents and artistic disciplines. In collaboration with the artist Micaela Perera Diaz, he created Curiyú/Carillón (2011-2012), a large sound sculpture that at the same time became a character in a variable ensemble piece (Unísonos imposibles [Impossible Unisons] from 2012). The disguising of culturally located sound phenomena and the search for formats that transcend artistic disciplines will also characterize Budón’s works here in Berlin. We can anticipate a large-scale orchestration of sound that unfolds as a hybrid of sound installation and concert, and which, as a »spatialized orchestra of reconfigured guitars«, generates a floating sonic field within which the instrumentalists and listeners move.

Text: Fabian Czolbe, 2014