Edu Comelles
23 June 2014 – 29 June 2014
Edu Comelles, who lives and works in Valencia, is an artist, musician and cultural manager. His work combines experimentation, sound art, music production and sound design in different fields of culture.
He has performed, solo or with collaborations, at festivals such as Sónar, Mutek, Eufónic, Fase and many others; he has also participated in events such as Mobile Week BCN, Escuchar in Buenos Aires and Radar in Mexico City. His performances often take place in singular spaces, from natural spaces, to public washing places, churches, gothic cloisters and an endless number of atypical spaces.
His work, live or in the form of installations or compositions, has been heard at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, LABoral in Gijón, Tabakalera (Donostia), Espai Rambleta, Bombas Gens in Valencia; Etopia (Zaragoza), CAAM (Gran Canaria) or the CCCB, Caixaforum and Arts Santa Mónica in Barcelona, his hometown.
In 2017 he won the prestigious Leonardo / BBVA Grant in the digital art category with the project Spectre. He has also been awarded prizes and grants such as Emergents (Málaga), Labore (Euskadi), Laboral / Lo Pati, or the Pépinières européennes grant in Huesca; as well as having been selected in competitions such as Naturalizarte, Art Públic / Universitat Pública or the Biennal de Mislata in Valencia, among others.
Since 2007 he has been directing Audiotalaia, a digital platform or netlabel dedicated to the training, edition, production and dissemination of experimental music and sound art under Creative Commons licenses. Every summer, this platform organises the Summer Camp, an international meeting of young sound artists that takes place in the interior of Catalonia.
Comelles has promoted the Sound Art and Experimental Music Section of the Ensems Festival in Valencia between 2016 and 2018. He curated the Espai Sonor cycle at the EACC in Castellón between 2016 and 2017. In Valencia, between 2010 and 2014, he was the director of the concert series Herzios, Off_Herzios and La Gallera Suena, programming concerts in different venues and art halls in Valencia.
Comelles holds a PhD in Fine Arts, a Master in Sound Design from the University of Edinburgh and a Master in Visual Arts and Multimedia from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Since 2010 he has been giving workshops on soundscape, microphony and self-management all over the country, in self-managed spaces, galleries and cultural centres.
Project in residence
Paisajes Imposibles
During his residency at LABoral, Edu Comelles will develop Paisajes Imposibles, a generative sound installation that aims to show an invented landscape. This sound panorama is made up of an infinite number of environments, sounds or sets of sounds from different origins. All of them form a frieze organised around a very specific sound mark: the hourly ringing of bells in several villages in Asturias and near the Ebro delta.
Paisajes Imposibles is a sound collage, a recreation of an imaginary landscape created from fragments of other, foreign realities with the aim of exploring new creative avenues and new formats for sampling the soundscape.
The computer system that activates this invented soundscape is a random device that scales the changes produced in a 24-hour period into two hours of duration. The time uses are determined by a clock created from different bell tolls in different villages.
After his stay at LABoral, the artist will continue to develop his work at Lo Pati, Centre d’Art de les Terres de l’Ebre, which together with LABoral is organising this shared residency, and will present his installation as part of Eufònic – Mostra d’Art Sonor i Visual de les Terres de l’Ebre in the first ten days of July.
