Rodrigo: Boris Chimp 504 is a live audio-visual performance. Miguel plays on stage live electronic instruments, while I manipulate live generative visuals that are reacting to sound. In that way the sound modulates what we are seeing on the screen.
Miguel: Also the generated visuals influence how sound is made since there is a lot of improvisation.

Miguel: We prefer to think of ourselves as two guys that have been rehearsing a lot in these past seven years. This project started as a need from both to jam in an audio-visual way. I came from sound and didn’t know anything about doing visuals; Rodrigo came from visuals and didn’t know how to work with sound. It was the perfect match! After solving the technical issues we became freer to ride our sci-fi stories and let the imagination get loose.
Rodrigo: The live performances are created from improvised sessions where music and visuals follow a common path, but where nothing is predetermined. It is a real time interactive/reactive system between the audio and the image, between the human and the machine.

Rodrigo: ‘Past futures and futures from the past’ are a big source of inspiration for us. The ‘60s and the ‘70s were a time with big expectations on the future, on space exploration and technology. If we take a look at sci-fi movies and literature from that time, we see that by around 2000s we were supposed to be living in a technologic-space-utopia, and to be part of an interplanetary civilization. So for us, it makes total sense to take this ‘past futures’ as a starting point.

Miguel: Actually what happened in the past – Boris Chimp 504 being sent to the Moon and staying there – was the starting point for us to grab this character and imagine what would he be doing while lost in space. Since then we’ve been telling tales of a supposed ‘chimp entity’ wandering around hyperspace, mixing real scientific known facts with our own sci-fi geek backgrounds. From the Moon Episode we went to Lost in Space and Kepler (among others) and we even started a series of interactive installations – titled Non Human Device – to give the opportunity to other people to enter and manipulate our ‘chimp’s world’.
Rodrigo: Right now on Multiverse – the show we’re presenting at Sónar –, Boris discovers that more universes and dimensions exist. There is not only one universe but many universes instead (the reason behind the name Multiverse). He discovers how to travel between space, time and higher dimensions, and how to jump between parallel universes.

Rodrigo: The project’s name was taken from a speculative fiction article written by Dwayne Allen Day in 1969 (titled Details of the Soviet Primate Lunar Landing Program). The article is about a cosmonaut chimp who was sent on a mission to the Moon and never returned, his last communication being sent from the Moon’s surface on July 7th 1969. The audio-visual live performance takes this fringe event as a starting point for its narrative, sound and visual aesthetics.
Other references include 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick, Tintin: Destination Moon by Hergé, the series Valérian & Laureline, illustrator and filmmaker Enki Bilal, writer Philip K. Dick (specially it’s book The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), and Michio Kaku’s Physics of the impossible, among others.
Miguel: We definitely believe Boris is out there and we like to think of ourselves as his connecting team to planet Earth.

Miguel: I lived in Barcelona for nine years and attended practically every Sónar while living there, so being able to present our work at this year’s edition is definitely special. Also Boris Chimp 504 started in Barcelona when we were both living there, so it’s like coming back to the starting point of this adventure, but more structured and hopefully delivering a most intense immersive experience than the last ones.
Rodrigo: I have attended Sónar many times, and it has always been a reference for me on electronic music and technology, so I am very happy to perform this year. Regarding Sónar+D it is really special for me to see our name in the tech-show list, side by side with some of my favourite artists such as Daito Manabe, Anti-VJ or Nonotak. Sónar+D is pushing the borders and connections between music, arts and technology further every year, so I am really curious to check this year’s acts and news, especially Daito Manabe´s installation Phosphere, and also the immersive experiences at the new stage, Sonar360º.

Rodrigo: Although technically the visuals are dependent from the sound, what happens onstage is that the reactive visuals influence in many ways the sound being produced. Miguel is constantly looking at the visuals and watching the effects that his sounds are producing on them. This allows him to explore and manipulate the sounds according to the visual output.
Miguel: Besides all the software and machines there’s a lot of human factor. With time we’ve managed to connect between ourselves in a way similar to the one jazz musicians use to communicate in a jam. The only difference is that here there’s a sound guy with a visual guy.

We hope to engage the audience in multi-sensorial experiences and create an immersive space voyage.