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Doce Fuegos

1 February 2024 – 31 July 2024

Doce Fuegos is a musical project created in 2018 by Oviedo-based Sevillian Miguel Palou. With a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute of Florence in 2016, and musically trained at CPM Cristóbal de Morales in Seville, he decided to leave the academic field to delve into sound experimentation and improvisation, using only the violin, mandolin and percussions. Doce Fuegos, in turn, was based on a way to delve into the narrative possibilities of this music and ask why we tell stories, myths, legends or memories.

The style of Doce Fuegos is situated between folk (in its broadest sense) and drone ambient, drawing inspiration from a wide range of styles and works: the composers of baroque and impressionism; medieval and oriental music; the post-rock of Swans or Godspeed You! Black Emperor; the arcane darkwave of Dead can Dance and Coil; black metal; or sound artists such as Anna von Hausswolf and Kali Malone.

Besides Doce Fuegos, Miguel is continuously forming projects and collaborating with musicians at a national level, from ambient and noise to extreme metal: Misa Tridente, Dronespell & the Omega Chord (with members of Orthodox), Spagyria, etc.

Project in residence

Quien escucha su nombre oye

Doce Fuegos has started a new trilogy of recordings based on Asturian mythology and bestiary and its relationship with the natural environment. This is based on an anthropological investigation of Asturian legends and customs, which in turn joins a subjectivity resulting from the contemplation and tour of its natural landscapes: a situation analogous to the experience of Romanticism in terms of folkloric and aesthetics of the sublime. This experience serves as an artistic source for the composition of music, as well as the realization of photos that document the process of creation and inspiration. Special mention should be made of the abandoned houses, mills and brañas: places where myths and monsters inspired by their environment were created and told, whose nature now invades these spaces, forming a place where a strange abyss of memory, myth and biology is founded.

This trilogy, Quien escucha su nombre oye, is a tribute to the stories that women and men told in their homes, from village to village, in the warmth of bonfires or with the sound of the rain. It is also a way to return, from a personal prism, the legends to the public and that the public can re-create through music and images. Monsters and myths are part of the history of what we are, and a reflection of the perception of reality; they are the pillars of the primordial act of storytelling, describers of past and present of what surrounds us.

Organizes