‘Singing became a form of resistance and care.’ An interview with Santiago Latorre
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Santiago Latorre is an artist and engineer using digital technologies to explore the limits between performative and sonic elements. Moved by stories of injury and recovery, he designs systems that connect light and sound through movement, weaving together multiple timelines of healing. Like someone who loses their sight and begins to see better, Latorre’s work shows the capacity of the body as a focus of associations, of material and immaterial encounters with sound and with other bodies.
Can you tell us about your background? How did you get into music?
I started my journey in classical music when I was seven, playing piano and saxophone, but became disillusioned with the classical world pretty soon and left the conservatory as a teenager to focus on jazz improvisation. In my early twenties, I realized that jazz too did not fully resonate with me and, like many other young musicians in the beginning of the 2000s, I gravitated towards electronic music. I always really loved machines and all sorts of devices since I was a kid, and so I ended up studying Telecommunications Engineering, which basically means lots of digital signal processing.
Then I worked as a studio engineer in Barcelona, where I learned the production techniques and aesthetics of the recorded music industry: pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop, and so on. It was in this setting that I began working on my own music, using the recording and processing techniques I was discovering there to reimagine the saxophone—an instrument I had struggled to connect with since childhood. Over time, a path that often felt frustrating, constantly leaving things unfinished, and never fitting in, allowed me to find my own aesthetic world.
Your research came into practice for personal reasons as well – after your hand injury, you were unable to work with musical instruments and computers, and developed your voice work more. Can you talk about this moment of searching for the right tools to express what you would like in spite of your injury?
When I got injured, I was living a pretty hectic life in London. I had to move back to Spain and began a process of slowing down and healing, which took about two years and two surgeries. My friend Nieves Arilla, who was going through a breakup at the time, and I used to get together, drink muscatel wine, and sing very old songs, the kind of songs that your grandmother would love. We started a project called A pie de cama, where we sang a mix of those old songs and some of our own into the ear of people lying in bed. It was a very intense experience; the audience would enter very intimate moments in front of our eyes, just one or two feet away from us, and would often cry. Singing became a form of resistance and care. We were caring for them, but also for ourselves.
After recovering from the injuries in my arms, I realised it wasn’t going to be like before, I wasn’t gonna be able to play the saxophone or the piano for long hours, so I decided to focus more on my voice, which I had never trained before.
You’re both an artist and an engineer, using digital technologies to facilitate your visions. In particular, the limits between performative and sonic elements. Can you talk about this?
I have always felt like I have one foot in each world, like my mind is split in two, and that can be a challenge. Oftentimes I have thought, shouldn’t I just concentrate on one thing, become the best singer I can be, or the best sax player, or the best producer or mixing engineer, or whatever? It happens that after weeks of working on just production, for example, I try to sing something, and I feel like I don’t even remember how to sing a song, like how is it that people open their mouths and just sing? And the same happens the other way around, I go back to my computer and can’t remember how to program a sensor to do the most basic thing, or what plugins I’d use to create this or that sound. But then I realize that, in my case, the most interesting things happen when all those tools come together. It’s a weird, kind of magical moment when all of the imperfect techniques become expressive in a unique way.
Your research led to the creation of a special system called “Lucy”, which allows sound and light to be affected in real time by the movements of the performer’s hands. Can you talk about this project?
I started playing around with contactless movement sensors to modify the sound of my voice. I was trying to get back that feeling of actually playing an instrument, and singing while waving my hands through the air felt surprisingly great, almost like doing some kind of musical physiotherapy. Once that part was working well, I added the ability to control lights and other things like fans and hazers, and that’s when the system became interesting: movement, sound, and light constantly affecting each other in a kind of feedback loop. Technically, Lucy is nothing super sophisticated, it runs on a Kinect sensor, Max/MSP, and Ableton Live. What makes it interesting, I think, is how it’s put together, and also how delicate it is. It’s kind of unpredictable sometimes, which makes it tough to repeat the same patterns or harmonies. You have to stay present, listen, and react to what is happening at each moment.
Recovery as such is also an important part of your work. What role does recovery play in your work?
Apart from singing and working on developing Lucy, the other thing that allowed me to move forward and start making music again after the injuries was collaboration, and it is something that has become a key part of my work ever since. After my first two albums, where I did pretty much everything myself, from writing and performing to mixing and mastering, I started collaborating with Colin Self, Atabey Mamasita, and Nieves Arilla on an album called Architecture of Friendship. The project takes its name from the words of Hannah Arendt, who, after being accused of a lack of love for the Jews, responded: “You are quite right. I don’t love any people – neither the French, nor the North American, nor the Jewish, nor the Blacks. I love only my friends.” We were interested in going beyond individual logics of work, in developing a creative practice of building together, inspired by pre-capitalist and non-Western sound forms. Collaboration can be understood here as a path to symbiosis, coexistence, and codependency.
You ran a space called Etopia in Zaragoza, Spain. Can you talk about this initiative?
Etopia was a pretty incredible place that was active as an Art and Technology Centre between 2012 and 2024. It had a huge sound studio with some high-end equipment and the biggest artist residency in Europe. For eight years, I coordinated the studio and curated its residency programs. We aimed to foster a community, interconnecting artists, creatives, and collectives who, from different angles of music and art, worked with sound as their tool. During this time, I commissioned and accompanied the work of artists like Eartheater, Gabriel Massan, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Lafawndah aka Kukii, Slim Soledad, or Dorian Wood. And I also used the space to develop my projects.
Last year, the local government decided to cut all the art programs and transform and repurpose the spaces for “entrepreneurship and innovation”. It has been sad to see something so valuable completely dismantled. And it’s not an isolated event; funding cuts to experimental art are happening all across Europe, which is so scary.
What are your current activities?
I am working on a new record now, drawing inspiration from Barcelona’s pre-Civil War El Barrio Chino. This was a notorious neighbourhood around the 1930’s, known as a gathering place for sex workers, queers, sailors, and copla singers, at a time when the two sides of Spanish society were on the verge of a violent clash. I’m using slowed-down brass samples from pasodobles, typical of bullfighting music, and Holy Week drum patterns, and blending them with eroticism, desire, explicit sexuality, and heart-wrenching romanticism.
For the past two years, I’ve also been working with choreographer Trajal Harrell. Together, we created the sound design for his piece Tambourins at Schauspielhaus Zürich and are now starting a new project called Welcome to Asbestos Hall that is being developed/presented as a work-in-progress at Kunsten Festival in Brussels and Holland Festival in Amsterdam in the coming months.
