Please note: this event includes strobe lights / special lighting effects, which may affect individuals with light sensitivities.

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros’ MAKINA TRAX unfolds as a free deformation of the mákina sound—a subgenre of Spanish techno with a fast, hard-edged style that emerged in Spain in the early 1990s, becoming a soundtrack for youth in Valencia, Barcelona, and beyond, particularly within working-class communities.. MAKINA TRAX bends, stretches, and fractures its fevered pulse into unstable rhythms, caught between propulsion and collapse. Although wildly popular, mákina was long dismissed by critics as low-quality, functional music—a paradox of mass success and cultural stigma. With MAKINA TRAX, Jiménez de Cisneros asks what happens when a form already treated as marginal is pushed further toward the edges.

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (b.1975, Barcelona) is part of the computer music group EVOL together with Scottish artist Stephen Sharp. Their work considers processes of deformation applied to post-acid house culture. Their recordings have been published by record labels such as Diagonal, Editions Mego, Presto!?, iDEAL, Hypermedium and others. Much of his work interprets music in morphological terms: mutated forms, spatial relationships, and elasticity, both metaphorical and literal. Since 2013, he has pushed this spatial-material approach to music in different ways, originally drawing connections between holes and music, then extending that to folds and folding, to produce a series of pieces, talks, light installations, and publications that propose a reevaluation of musical phenomena as volumetric and topological structures. MAKINA TRAX is Jiménez de Cisneros’s fourth project with Lampo. In November 2019, he premiered Six Hexaflexagons for Chicago, an audiovisual piece and homage to early Chicago house music. In February 2016 he presented EVOL’s Opus17aSlimeVariation#8—a reinterpretation of Hanne Darboven’s Opus 17a. He first appeared in the Lampo series in October 2011.

Artist Talk:

Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W Jackson Blvd. #1656. Thursday, October 9, 6 p.m. 
Register to attend

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros discusses Untitled Drum Permutations, his project built on a simple but overwhelming premise: playing every possible ordering of eleven drum machine sounds—over 39 million unique permutations. Using the iconic Roland TR-909, it becomes a systematic yet strangely meditative exploration of limits, repetition, pattern deformation, and attention. What begins as a mechanical process soon raises deeper questions about how we listen, how memory functions in music, and how sheer quantity can shift our perception of time. He situates the work within larger cultural patterns, positioning it alongside economics, horror, and magic.

Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.