I’ve just released a new song titled Tell Me When.
It was born from a disturbing question:
What if even disobedience required permission?
The song tells the story of someone who has fully given up their decision-making — someone who no longer acts unless instructed by someone… or something. Even getting it wrong requires a signal.
Musically, it’s an intimate, restrained piece where acoustic and electronic elements coexist. The voice is layered with subtle synthetic textures and a mechanical pulse provided by the "Synth" from Polyend, combined with acoustic guitar and a four-part string arrangement.
It’s part of my ongoing project The Machine in the Botanical Garden, where I explore the relationship between humanity, emotion, and technology.
You can listen to it on all major streaming platforms, and read more about the song on the project’s official site.
What if perfection were within reach, by becoming something artificial?
Ageless, flawless, fearless…
An eternal beauty, untouched by time.
In Metamorphosis, one of the garden’s characters gives in to that longing. He dreams of merging with the machine. And in doing so, he sees the world from that new, precise, immaculate place.
But something is lost.
And it’s precisely that absence —what he can no longer feel— that wakes him up.
The track is part of The Machine in the Botanical Garden, a project that blends acoustic and electronic elements to tell poetic, symbolic stories.
Ever since I got my hands on it, Samarkanda by XAOC Devices has fascinated me.
I’ve used it in a recent piece that blends modular synths with a fully written string quartet — seeking a balance between repetition and movement, between digital textures and classical writing.
In this case, the East Beast runs a very simple sequence, almost like a cantus firmus, creating space for the Samarkanda delays and the evolving harmony of the strings to grow, intertwine, and reshape the whole. Like vines slowly covering a block of concrete until it becomes part of the landscape.
I combined channels in normal and reverse modes, synced from Pamela’s New Workout.
One of the delays is very short, with high feedback, producing a metallic resonance.
Another builds rhythmic momentum by increasing the wet mix and opening up the East Beast’s filter — a sort of refrain or peak moment in the piece.
Although my experience with the module is still fresh, its immediate musical response, flexibility, and sonic depth have inspired me from the very first patch.
About the module
Samarkanda is a four-channel digital delay with resampling, looping, reverse, and external sync capabilities.
It can behave like an analog-style delay (tape or BBD), or as a granular digital delay, with the ability to switch behavior independently per channel.
Each of the four delay lines features:
Delay times from 0.5ms to 15s, or up to 60s in stacked mode.
Reverse, hold (freezer), feedback control, and CV modulation.
External clock sync with time division/multiplication (from 1:8 to 8:1).
Voltage control over delay time, feedback, and mix.
A default stacked routing for internal serial processing with no quality loss.
Samarkanda is designed not as a decorative FX module, but as a performance-ready delay instrument.
It can sound clean, precise, and reactive, but also chaotic, resonant, and saturated, depending on how far you push it.
Garden Tales is the new album by The Machine in the Botanical Garden, and it’s now available in full on platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes. This project brings together seven tracks released over the past year, all set in a garden where fantastic things are always happening. Each song tells a story inspired by the characters who inhabit this mysterious and barely explored universe.
The music blends electronic sequences, classical string arrangements, and AI-generated vocals that perform lyrics and melodies entirely composed by me. Everything is written, created, and produced from a human sensibility, using technology as just another expressive tool. The result is a kind of symbiosis between the organic and the artificial, the emotional and the mechanical. Garden Tales is an invitation to listen with your eyes closed and let yourself be carried away by a sonic narrative that plays with the boundary between the natural and the synthetic, the ancient and the futuristic.
Garden Tales es el nuevo álbum de The Machine in the Botanical Garden, y ya puede escucharse completo en plataformas como YouTube, Spotify o iTunes.
Este proyecto reúne siete canciones publicadas durante el último año, ambientadas en un jardín donde siempre ocurren cosas fantásticas. Cada tema cuenta una historia, inspirada en los personajes que habitan este universo misterioso y apenas explorado.
La música combina secuencias electrónicas, arreglos clásicos de cuerdas y voces generadas por inteligencia artificial, que interpretan letras y melodías compuestas íntegramente por mí. Todo está escrito, creado y producido desde una sensibilidad humana, utilizando la tecnología como una herramienta expresiva más. El resultado es una especie de simbiosis entre lo orgánico y lo artificial, lo emocional y lo mecánico.
Garden Tales es una invitación a escuchar con los ojos cerrados y dejarse llevar por una narrativa sonora que juega con la frontera entre lo natural y lo sintético, lo antiguo y lo futuro.
Tema compuesto para el proyecto musical Mei Ming en 2009, grabado entre 2009 y 2015 pero masterizado y publicado ahora. En la voz Martha Gallart.
Canción disponible en la principales plataformas digitales.
https://open.spotify.com/album/7Mrs4mQCzkS1lQS65UwBp6?si=_UlOaJGwT0--khxwiqJXug
This work tells the story of a cricket who, instead of using his song for biological mating purposes, chooses to dedicate himself to art. With his melodies, produced by rubbing his wings, this cricket not only attracts other insects and animals but also faces criticism and skepticism from his contemporaries. His love for music leads him to found a school, inspiring a generation of cricket musicians who eventually form orchestras and revolutionize their world. This piece was composed for the project 'The Machine in the Botanical Garden.' Available on major digital platforms
