Tectonics 2026 Artist Profile
Angélica Castelló
Angélica Castelló is a Mexican-Austrian composer, recorder player, improviser, sound artist, and magnetophonic tape weaver—an act that, in metaphor and in praxis, encompasses her practice at large.
Her works intertwine bits and pieces of life into electroacoustic spells—memories, death, solace, trauma, resilience, fragility, the oneiric, the subconscious—evoking the beauty and challenge of being alive. Such spells take many shapes; they sway between instrumental and electroacoustic compositions, woven installations, reverberating altars, abstract improvisations, and performances echoing people, nature, dreams and nightmares, fleeting and ephemeral moments. All turned into resonant beings. Her fascination with so-called obsolete machines—tapes, cassettes, radios, magnetophones—unfolds with the exploration of digital realms: lo-fi and hi-fi textures, synthetic and recorded sounds, field recordings, and the use of her Paetzold recorders as well as of her own voice—recording as an act of braiding memory (lat. recordare).
An example is her debut album, Bestiario, released in 2011. In this work, Castelló gathers seven stories turned into sonic sculptures that offer an abstract insight into the personal forces that initially set them in motion— biographical turning points and private memories lurking in Angélica Castelló’s mind, waiting to be caught and tamed (Andreas Felber).
Her work stems from aural recollections, field recordings, and ‘sons trouvés’ composed beyond the immediately perceptible: evoking haptics, colors, presences, and scents exhaled by the narrative itself. These sonic fragments are often distorted beyond recognition and woven into intricate dialogues with quotations from Renaissance and Baroque composers, echoes of Castelló’s earlier pieces, and with voices recorded specifically for the compositions. These recordings are re-layered across formats— from lo to hi-fi, analogue and digital—composed, deconstructed, and recomposed into polyphonic constellations.
Angélica Castelló composes and collaborates with a wide range of chamber ensembles and orchestras, including the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, PHACE, Ictus Ensemble, Reconsil Ensemble, Koehne Quartet, Haydn Piano Trio, Danubia Saxophone Quartet, and Ensemble Kwadrofonik, among others. Her compositional work extends to theatre, dance, film, radio, and sound installations that operate at the intersection of music, performance, and visual art.
Tectonics Glasgow 2026
Sat 2 May, 3.30pm, Old Fruitmarket - solo set Espacio ∞
Sat 2 May, 8.00pm, Grand Hall - Star Washers (for orchestra and electronics) UK Premiere
Espacio ∞ is an ongoing composition without a final form.
The word space—from Latin spatium, meaning room, area, distance, or stretch of time, universe —carries both the sense of a place and an interval, a physical site and a temporal opening.
This multiple meanings become a source of inspiration for my works. My espacios are rooms where sounds enter, meet, circulate, coexist, disappear and return, guided more by their own tendencies rather than by story or theme. From time to time I like to name my compositions and performances „espacio“ only to liberate them of a particular content and have the idea that I set them free.
In my music, and particularly in the “Espacios” series, I want to create textures similar to swarms, clouds of noise and wind, abysses of sine waves and water sounds, blending the sounds of a live instrument with electronic sounds and, in the electronic mix, those of analog machines, broken radios, old tapes, as well as purely crystalline field recordings... I am interested in sounds and their own narratives: how they relate, influence one another, and shape the space they inhabit.
Espacios can become a fixed form: defined structures in which sonic materials can be more carefully shaped and brought into focus. These works are complete, ready compositions—framed spaces. However in „Espacio ∞“ this amalgamating happens live, improvising or „composing in real time“, sculpting a never ending piece, perpetually in motion, never settling into closure.
Still, there is a fixed duration of a performance; it starts somewhere and “finishes”… yet always leaves a door open to continue next time.
