SSC Workshop with Colin Tucker and Luis Lecea Romera

Tremors in Place: On the Instrumentality of Vibration at the Periphery of Spain’s Culture–Environment Interface

This practice-based doctoral research contributes new understanding to how vibration functions as a conduit of environmental, political, and evidentiary significance. Building on the emerging field of tremology—the study of vibrating phenomena (Eldner, 2015)—it investigates how vibrational forces shape spatial governance and ideological inscription. Engaging with the epistemology and aesthetics of trembling, the project asks how vibrational regimes can be understood and reconfigured as sites of both control and critical resistance, as they are sensed, produced, and mediated through instruments conceived as sonic, spatial, and infrastructural systems.

Combining theoretical, applied, and field-based approaches from sound studies and critical spatial practice, the research examines state-driven assertions of territorial control at the periphery of the late and post-Francoist Spanish state. Grounded in Steve Goodman’s vibrational ontology (2009) and José Val del Omar’s mecamística (1955), it explores how vibrational regimes materialise through sonic and spatial means, with a focus on the primary cases of the underground footstep and heartbeat detection systems embedded in the EU–Morocco border infrastructure in Melilla, and the colonial logistical remnants of the oscillating land-to-sea aerial cable-car system in the shallow port of Sidi Ifni.

This tension between emission and perception serves as the basis for the introduction of necrotremology, a research framework for understanding vibration as a spectral imprint of biopolitical violence and a sensorial carrier of political and environmental complexities. This concept informs the conception of instruments that render perceptible traces of power that tremble through sonic and spatial fabrics of territory and infrastructure. Reframing Édouard Glissant’s trembling thinking (2007) as a critical stance against the backdrop of resurgent authoritarianism and expanding extractive frontiers, the project aims to position experimental instrument-making as a methodology of situated creation and a practice of counter-action.

To this end, the research reclaims the under-recognised legacy of Dutch artist, musicologist, and experimental luthier Nelly van Ree Bernard as a practice of speculative organology, a research methodology to foster the emergence of hybrid forms that unsettle conventional taxonomies of what instruments are and do. By enabling the conceptualisation of missing links between situated sonic, spatial, and infrastructural technologies, the project culminates in a body of installation works and sound compositions that inquire into the instrumentalisation of vibration in the (post-)Francoist landscape and elaborate on lineages of resistance that continue to resonate through it.

Bio
Luis Lecea Romera is an artist, composer, and educator based in Amsterdam and Madrid, with a background in architecture and contemporary music. His practice manipulates material and aural spaces through site-relational installations, compositions, and performances. Employing recorded and archival sound, altered objects, and audio-spatial instruments, his work elaborates on the affective and narrative capabilities of vibration and resonance set against bodily, architectural, and landscape contexts.
His recent presentations include Arti et Amiticiae (Amsterdam, NL), Sala de Arte Joven (Madrid, ES), CC Can Felipa (Barcelona, ES), Amsterdam Art Week at Vlaams Cultuurhuis De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam, NL), MMMAD Festival at Matadero (Madrid, ES), infinity rug at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, DE), gnration (Braga, PT), Frascati Theater (Amsterdam, NL), Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (Tenerife, ES), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL), among others. He has been artist in residence with FIBER Festival (Amsterdam, NL), Semibreve Festival (Braga, PT), Ezprogui (Navarra, ES), Habitat (Cà de Monti, IT).

Music-as-Sound, Sound Art, and Racializing Sensory Hierarchy

Current sound art canons, which continue to be central to the field of sound studies, are predicated on assumptions of sound art’s total break from concert music norms. My presentation questions these assumptions by attending to unthought historical continuities between music and sound art, specifically around the politics of sensation. I consider how sound art re-enshrines concert music’s racializing sensory hierarchy of aural over “low” senses, through attention to the watershed sound work of Max Neuhaus. Specifically, I read two realizations of Neuhaus’s LISTEN—the artist’s New York Times editorial (1974) and, as recounted in the artist’s text LISTEN (2004), the initial LISTEN sound walk (1966)—through analytics of critical ethnic studies scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva, in order to excavate how both projects articulate a racially-unmarked, self-determined listener over-against racially-marked figures of sensory incapacity, specifically “primitive societies” and the “Puerto Rican” environs of a “rumbling,” toxic power plant, respectively. I juxtapose this interpretation with a critical reading of historically inaugural writings on (concert music) aesthetics by Immanuel Kant (1790) and Eduard Hanslick (1854), in order to historicize sound art as an update of rather than a break from concert music’s racializing sensory hierarchies. I argue that Neuhaus’s physical exit from the concert hall is subtended by an embrace of this institution’s racializing ontologies of sensation. In conclusion, by positioning threshold sound art works within a long history of concert music, and reading this history through critical ethnic studies analytics, this presentation complicates familiar narratives about sound art as a field, while also opening up analytic routes towards disarticulating this field from racializing ontologies of sensation. The presentation begins with a scholarly presentation and is followed by informal realizations of artistic works which press the paper’s argument into archives of concert music and sound art listening, specifically 1) realizations of the author’s textual scores for listeners, audio, objects, and more, and 2) against-the-grain responses to Neuhaus’s canonical piece/notation LISTEN. Attendees are welcome to participate (no specialized skills required) or not participate in the realizations.

Bio
I am an artist and curator who investigates intersections between decoloniality, experimental music, and contemporary art. I currently work as a freelance artist and as founding artistic director of Null Point—an artist-run initiative focused on intersections between music and contemporary art—and live as a settler in Tkaronto (known colonially as Toronto), on the occupied lands of the Dish With One Spoon Treaty.
My works have been performed by ensembles dal niente, East Coast Contemporary Ensemble (ECCE), ELISION, Linea, S.E.M., soundinitiative, Surplus, and Uusinta, and the symphony orchestras of Detroit and Ann Arbor, presented at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Constellation Frequency Series, Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Eastman School of Music, Issue Project Room, June in Buffalo, Kleinhans Music Hall (Buffalo), MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, New England Conservatory, Orchestra Hall (Detroit), Slingshot Festival, and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics—Stanford University, and recognized by grants and awards from Akademie Schloss Solitude and Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI).
Past curatorial projects have been presented by the Cikada Ensemble, Hopkins Center for the Arts—Dartmouth College, DePauw University, the Fridman Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Norwegian Academy of Music, Lewis Center for the Arts—Princeton University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Squeaky Wheel, and Temple University, and with financial support from Art Bridges Foundation, New Music USA, and the arts councils of Norway, NY, and Toronto.
I hold degrees in music composition from the University at Buffalo (SUNY) (PhD), University of Huddersfield (MPhil) and the University of Michigan (BM, summa cum laude). At UB, I was a Presidential Fellow, Dissertation Fellow, and teaching assistant.