Everything started with four pieces that I composed, which I later reworked. They were four academic exercises in style, clearly defined, but I wanted to tear them apart because they no longer represented me. While sheet music can be torn, music itself cannot, so I decided to stretch it.

Then I was carried away: I started recording brief moments from concerts, from my choir rehearsals, and from the sounds of nature in the city. Then I would go home and stretch them; in a way, it was as if I were recreating them, modifying reality as I wanted, or seeing it in another way, knowing that I could transform the essence of things. It felt somewhat demiurgic.

I discovered the expressive power of stretching. It’s music that emerges empirically, destroying all predefined academicism and structural intent. I thought of a painter who throws color onto a canvas: it starts from chance, and then each stretch seems to call for the next; I write what I feel must follow. Each stretch has its own nature; it needs to last longer or suddenly cease. I sense whether it should repeat, whether the repetition should be identical or different, whether it should be transposed or layered… one second more, one second less; a few decibels more, a few decibels less, without any grid.

I chose to stretch to create a space-time dimension, like a Picassian distortion of a figure, in this case, a musical one. In extreme stretching, I achieved an almost grotesque granulation of the musical figure and a total distortion of the instrument, which seems to open up, revealing the weaves that make up its sound.

But behind the stretching, I’ve also concealed a caricatured intent, which creates a different listening experience: stretching can extend those moments in a piece that we wish lasted longer, slowing their time down, almost freezing them, allowing us to savor them fully. By using stretching as a caricatured emphasis of the piece, the stretched version does not represent exactly a new piece; instead, it aims to represent the perception of the original one, in a Platonic relationship between the earthly idea and its ideal, hyperuranic form.

“It took me four years to paint like Raffaello, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
—Pablo Picasso