Proton is a constellation of eight remarkable musicians, each a world of possibilities. For this first commission, I turned to Coco Schwarz—keyboardist, DJ, and hybrid artist—whose practice moves with fluid ease between instruments, genres, and identities.
Cocotrón is a gender-fluid composition, slipping across the porous borders of contemporary music, reggaeton, and the electronic dance floor.
Its opening parts grow from Coco’s sampler, an instrument woven from fragments of the internet—digital refuse transformed into sound. Out of discarded traces, new textures emerge.
The final part comes alive in real time through a score-generating algorithm. On their screens, performers glimpse only the measure they play and the one to come—no past, no future, only the present unfolding. The rules shape the architecture, yet the music remains unpredictable, breathing with its own logic.
The sections—necro, porno, narco—resonate with Paul Preciado’s Testo Junky, a reflection of a society driven by necro-porno-narco-capitalism. Here, those forces echo, refract, and transform into sound.
The work closes with a quotation from La Espuela del Gallo, a Colombian folk song—an homage to Ernesto Ocampo, musician and researcher, who left us in 2023.