Pablo, thank you very much for accepting our interview. Your catalogue and profile are quite diverse, but let’s begin concretely with one of your latest solo electric guitar pieces, L5 (2024), premiered by Álex Tentor. Tell us about this work—how is it constructed, what guitar techniques are involved, and so on.
Hi Joan, thank you for giving me the opportunity to be part of your platform. L5 is built from four musical objects, each structured as descending chromatic intervals. These objects consist not only of the corresponding pitch (with different durations for each object), but also of a silence associated with each note. Each note is followed by a measured glissando of less than a semitone. The piece largely consists of repetitions and reordering of these four objects.
Accents—which evolve into dyads in the second half of the piece—are downbeats relative to an underlying metric framework written in 5/4, with groups of five sixteenth notes per measure. This rhythmic grid is actually the piece’s generative core. The resulting score, notated as a kind of amalgam, is essentially a convention designed to facilitate performance.
There are also compositional elements drawn from architecture, especially in how the objects are ordered and in the proportions and articulations between the sections. Particularly important is the décalage between events, which introduces unpredictability within what is otherwise an obsessive repetition.
Before diving into formal aspects or musical material, some preliminary considerations were crucial in composing L5. The electric guitar—especially when played with distortion—carries strong stylistic associations with certain popular genres. In my case, coming from a background in extreme metal, I didn’t want the piece to lean too obviously in that direction.
This led me to use very little distortion, which is applied primarily to the dyads and heavily filtered in the high frequencies, aiming for a sound closer to subtractive synthesis. In line with that, I found that using a pick could conflict with my sonic intentions, so I opted for a right-hand technique where all notes are played with the tip of the thumb. To achieve greater consistency in the glissandi, I suggest that the performer use the same left-hand finger for all notes (either the third or second), which might not be “academic,” but proves effective.
Álex and I spent a great deal of time experimenting with sound until we arrived at what we considered the “definitive” version (in quotation marks, as that sound may still evolve slightly in future interpretations).
Another interesting aspect is that the piece is performed softly (mezzo-piano or piano), but it’s meant to sound quite loud. This expressive contrast is central to the compositional context I had in mind, but it also creates a potential issue during recording: how can one convey that a softly played piece should sound loud? My solution to this dilemma is reverb. I usually prefer to record my music with minimal reverb, to retain maximum control over silence. However, in this case—though silence remains a crucial structural element—reverb helps to suggest that the real dynamic weight of the piece is greater than what the performer is actually playing.
Let’s take a big leap back in time—ten years before your recent electric guitar piece, you wrote two works for acoustic guitar that follow a very different aesthetic. First, After Duke Ellington’s Prelude To A Kiss (2014), premiered by Rubén Parejo; and second, After Cage (2014), premiered by Amaia Miranda. The latter is a very different piece from the former, with an aesthetic less rooted in jazz and more minimalist and atonal—somewhat in the style of Webern. Tell us about these two very different compositions, both from each other and from the electric guitar piece.
These two works reflect a more traditional way of thinking about music—a time when I hadn’t yet fully distilled certain elements and influences. I must admit, I’ve often considered removing them from my catalogue, but I’m quite attached to them. I believe it can be valuable to share earlier stages in a composer’s creative development. Also, they were both written during my undergraduate years.
After Duke Ellington’s Prelude To A Kiss (dedicated to my guitar professor, Rubén Parejo) is clearly indebted to jazz. In fact, it’s a literal realization of the well-known standard that gives the piece its title, combined with a written-out improvisation. I wanted to reconcile a treatment of the guitar that resonates with some of the atonal and twelve-tone works already written for the instrument, with passages that are explicitly referential to the jazz idiom. In this regard, the influence of guitarist John Stowell was essential.
My relationship with jazz also took a very different form in a piece titled ;bd, which is a requiem for a dear friend.
This piece is built entirely (except for the introduction) using short looping fragments of Miles Davis’s iconic Blue in Green.
There’s another small example as well, this time based on a traditional blues form, which also features a quotation from Blue in Green.
I do intend to return to the world of jazz at some point, this time applying my current compositional approach. In this sense, I’ve been thinking of some ideas involving the electric guitar that I’d like to explore.
After Cage is a piece inspired by John Cage’s Music for Piano No. 2. Its rhythmic writing is indeterminate, represented using open proportional notation. There is also a certain degree of randomness in terms of register and the playing technique assigned to each note. For the (implicit) harmonic dimension of the piece, I used concepts from pitch-class set theory.
The part I find most interesting is the instrument’s tuning: I devised a microtonal tuning system based on the open fifth string. Combined with the untempered nature of the harmonics used—particularly major thirds and minor sevenths—this creates a high degree of harmonic friction within the overall stasis that defines the piece, in a music that has neither beginning nor end.
What differences and potential do you see, from your perspective, between the electric and classical guitar? Do you prefer one over the other, or feel more closely identified with either of them?
They’re two instruments that can be either very similar or entirely different, depending on how they’re approached. For me, one of the most important differences lies in the stylistic or genre connotations associated with each. The material of the strings is not a trivial matter either. When I think of an acoustic guitar, I’m specifically thinking of a classical guitar with nylon strings and, of course, there are many types of electric guitars.
The electric guitar, to me, is an instrument that is more open to being processed (especially through distortion) and is undeniably dependent on amplification. In fact, the electric guitar is almost an incomplete instrument—one that needs an amplifier to become whole—and within that combination of guitar and amp lies a world of infinite sonic possibilities.
I should add that I like to use these instruments in conventional ways. I used to experiment with extended techniques, but I’ve grown increasingly disinterested in them due to their overuse in contemporary music—often treated as mere effects without a strong compositional idea to support them.
Your music and artistic aesthetic show a strong interest in electronics: you’re a professor of electroacoustic composition at ESMUC, you use synthesizers both to compose and to improvise, you create techno music, and—as we’ve seen—the electric guitar is part of your repertoire. Tell us where this interest in such a different kind of sound comes from, how you apply it in your work, and how it influences your thinking and compositional process.
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure where my interest in this type of sound comes from. I’m drawn to it as a complement to acoustic sound. There’s something beautiful and sculptural about shaping electronic sound—about crafting it from the ground up. Having total control over what is heard is something I find deeply appealing.
Electronics present different challenges and ways of thinking, and I enjoy applying those perspectives to my acoustic music. My acoustic work would be very different if it hadn’t passed through the world of electronic sound and synthesis—especially modular synthesis. I also try to apply acoustic thinking to my work with electronics, sometimes even writing out in notation what I want to achieve electronically beforehand. It’s fascinating how the brain emphasizes certain modes of thought depending on the medium, and I like to use what one medium offers to enrich another.
I always tell my students (and I really care about this) that acoustic and electronic thinking can and should be connected—that they can enrich each other through the transfer of knowledge between both domains.
My interest in techno music essentially comes from the compositional possibilities of working with riffs, rhythm and timbre, and because it’s arguably the most experimental genre within all forms of electronic dance music.
The titles of my pieces in this field are made up of a number followed by the letter A or B. The numbers simply serve to keep track, while the letters refer to two types of pieces (I’m considering adding more categories in the future): the A-series pieces follow a more traditional rhetoric, with a stronger sense of narrative direction. The B-series pieces are more groove-oriented and rhythmically experimental, without relying on conventional narrative development.
Titles are an interesting topic. For some time now, I’ve been trying to use titles that are, let’s say, neutral—titles that don’t suggest anything to the listener or provide any kind of information. Lately (and I think this will probably stay with me), I’ve been more and more interested in being aseptic in this regard—not interfering with the listener’s perception through referential titles.
Many years ago, you were a bassist in black/death metal bands and similar genres. These influences have been filtered into your current work, but traces of them remain—for example, in a piece like Prelude to Darkness (2016) for piano, premiered by Lara Magrinyà, and more explicitly in another composition, not coincidentally titled Black (2019). This piece was performed by the CrossingLines Ensemble, of which you are now the artistic director. In Black, a work performed entirely in darkness with a minimalist aesthetic, we can observe your interest in soft dynamics, and “paradoxically,” it culminates in a powerful sonic catharsis. I believe there are connections in this piece with what we discussed earlier—do you think so too? How would you describe these compositions? Do you still identify with the black/death metal aesthetic?
I still identify a lot with those genres. I listen to them less than I used to, and with a different approach now, but they continue to be a part of my life and musical vocabulary.
Black is connected to my composition Blue; in fact, it’s the second of three works (with White being the third) in which I explored a direct relationship with various musical genres. Black is perhaps the first piece where the economy of means that defines much of my work emerges clearly, and where instrumental roles begin to assert themselves—enhanced, in this case, by the spatial arrangement on stage.
Black isn’t based on riff usage, as one might expect, but rather on the ritualistic idea proposed by black metal, where the use of light plays an essential role in the piece’s unfolding.
Apart from the final section—which is a consequence of the preceding restraint—the music develops through very soft dynamics. This is a constant in many of my compositions and might seem paradoxical, given my background in extreme metal, but loud dynamics bring several complications. The first is the kind of excitement they generate in the performance space. Playing softly gives me more control over the reverberation of the room and helps manage the natural inertia of the instruments, allowing for more precise handling of silence and articulation. This is particularly important in riff-based music, where the internal groove needs to remain clearly perceptible.
Moreover, acoustic instruments simply can’t compete in volume and density (even with amplification) with the sonic mass produced by extreme metal bands, and the result would likely feel obvious and superficial. Playing softly creates contrast, restraint, and tension that align much better with my artistic goals in this regard.
Prelude To Darkness is a composition built on the repetition (20 times, once for each double bar) of a rhythmic quotation from the track Closed Eye Visuals by the Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah (from minute 6:23 onward). The piece is composed of three musical objects: a tonally reminiscent chord spread across two octaves, a pedal strike with and without sustain, and the sound of the keys being forcefully scraped by the fingertips.
The placement of each of these elements follows criteria that go beyond the scope of this text, but the main idea is to bring out different moments of the rhythmic quotation to create a sense of constant evolution and to build a certain musical direction. The result is, in my view, a music that is monolithic and carries a degree of neutrality or abstraction, with a romantic echo in the harmony used.
Also for ensemble—including electric guitar, video, and electronics—another one of your works whose title reveals your interest in minimalism is Less is more (2016). Could you tell us about this piece, your general aesthetic, and your trajectory, given that all of this surely influences your way of conceiving music? Your taste for minimalism and structure is also evident in the fact that you trained as an architect, and you’re very interested in visual arts and dance as well.
Less is more is a work from my composition study period—actually the most recent from that time. It was my first commission from L’Auditori of Barcelona. In this piece, I tried to integrate the electric guitar into a large ensemble, something I haven’t done again since, but would like to try again in the future. The architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe was the inspiration for this composition, particularly his work on horizontality and verticality. It represents a kind of preliminary, somewhat naïve state of what later became a much stronger connection between my architectural studies and musical composition. I think of musical architecture both in terms of form and of sound objects, and how these objects and the different sections of a piece are articulated. I like not to divide compositions into movements, but to conceive them more as a whole—a solid, clear object with different parts. I apply this same formal concept to the programming of CrossingLines concerts. The study of space and architectural path as a temporal parameter is also very important to me.
I’m very interested in visual arts and dance, for different reasons. I think seeing how other art forms work, with their different paradigms, is a great source of ideas for one’s own creative work.
You were composer-in-residence at L’Auditori de Barcelona, which commissioned the piece X-Y, performed by the Barcelona Symphony and Catalonia National Orchestra. Let’s now move to a very different instrumental world—tell us about this experience.
I still remember the excitement I felt upon receiving the invitation from L’Auditori. Composing for orchestra was a very interesting challenge for me, because the orchestral world has generally not attracted me much, at least in terms of how instruments are typically used. Moreover, my way of thinking about music is, in a way, rather “anti-orchestral” in the classical sense. Precisely because of this, I approached the work with particular care, trying to bring the orchestra into my territory. Honestly, I think I succeeded, and I’d like to make further forays in this direction in the future (I already have some ideas in mind), even though I’m aware of how difficult these kinds of commissions can be to obtain.
X-Y is a piece based on preexisting music (in this sense, similar to ;bd), in which I selected fragments of music by Anton Webern and looped them, along with a rhythmic quotation (no pitches) from the song Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion by the Swedish band Meshuggah, and a quotation from my own piece L5DD. To all of this, I added a small sound object involving double bass, bass drum, timpani, and tam-tam, composed specifically for the piece. The compositional challenge was to unite all these elements and construct something with structural meaning. The result has a very electronic sound, even though it is based entirely on acoustic material.
To conclude, could you tell us about your future projects?
At the moment, I’m composing a string quartet with electronics for the German quartet Pulse, which will be premiered in Bremen in March 2026. This will be my second string quartet and a continuation of the one I wrote for the Catalan ensemble Quartet Gerhard, which will also be premiered in 2026.
In the coming months, the label Neu Records will release a recording of a piano piece over an hour long, titled L4DL4, performed by Lluïsa Espigolé. I’m very pleased with the result. It’s a work that’s emblematic of my search for an increasingly essential language and continues my interest in working with riffs and electronic influence in the acoustic realm.
I also have several techno music releases coming out over the course of the year, as well as other audiovisual music projects for major commercial brands.
In another area, I’d like to continue my pedagogical work in the form of short videos with musical reflections and analysis, which I regularly post on my Instagram channel. In addition, I’ll soon begin creating tutorials on electronic music composition and production, which I’ll share on my YouTube channel.
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