Javier Areal
Vélez

Shortly after we met, Javier Areal Vélez invited me to play bass in COSO, a post-punk trio that combined spasms of noise-driven violence with micro-mathematical compositions reminiscent of Xenakis. In compact, twelve-minute performances, COSO shattered two myths at once: punk musicians are not necessarily unskilled, nor is experimental music condemned to be hermetic, elitist, or dull. In retrospect, the sonic force did not reside solely in what we were playing, but also in a strange intersection between the abstract, manic compositions and the specific materiality of each performance. A chain of agencies between abstractions and materials—between humans, machines, and spaces—began to appear insistently, resurfacing throughout Javier’s later explorations.

After a long trajectory as a cultural manager (Javier founded the experimental music series RUIDO, which he still directs, and also coordinated the Sound Art Center – CASo), and as a musician who focuses on unconventional uses of the electric guitar, his recent artistic work cedes structural control to autonomous robots. The human being becomes part of a bio-mechanical assemblage—not as an expressive agent, but as one negotiator among many forces. Programming the automaton does not grant him control over its decisions; what remains is the possibility to interrupt, accelerate, or halt ongoing processes. In Trifásica (2025), a digital system selects and manipulates a series of samples, while the human effort to steer the operation generates detours and bifurcations. Through this tense negotiation, unexpected musical forms emerge.

In Corriente Parásita (2025), the automaton coordinates a large network of electromagnets and motors that are provisionally nested within a specific architecture. The machine-brain, in tension with the human impulse, excites the host structure, revealing its sonic materialities and resonant capacities. The building expresses itself acoustically, yet it is inhabited by a strange species—an organism that is not fully recognizable—speaking an unheard language through inert bodies.

Machine assemblages, in the Deleuzian sense, are not composed of organs. And if any fragment seems organic, it loses that condition by being endlessly recombinable. Yet the echoes left by machinic automatisms often produce emergent forms that suggest an absent organicity. The mutating assemblage of Corriente Parásita, Javier’s latest work before his DAAD residency, is the acoustic confirmation of this paradox: an assemblage that pushes to the limit the agencies between parasitic machinery and architecture. In this resonant oscillation between machinic and material potentials, an intermittent organic body emerges where none should exist—a body without organs that expresses itself organically. An anomalous animal whose breath and fury also reveal the algorithmic traces that decode and reorganize the system’s mutations. Assemblage and organism fold into each other in a sonic topology, where it becomes difficult to distinguish the living from the automatic, repetition from difference, or background from form.

Leonello Zambón
is an Argentine artist producing work that blends video, sound, installations, and urban interventions, making use of obsolete technologies.