After a series of concerts that, as a kind of prelude, helped create in Palma de Mallorca the right atmosphere for the arrival of its main annual event dedicated to contemporary artistic music, from 14 to 23 November the Balearic capital enjoyed a new edition—its seventh—of the ME_MMIX Festival of electronic music, mixed music, hybridizations, installation, connectivity, and contemporary creation. This event has turned Mallorca into an effervescent dialogue between very diverse ways of understanding music and interdisciplinarity. SCHERZO attended the festival from 20 to 22 November, days that offered a very rich and varied programme of activities, which we will be reporting on throughout the week.
One of the first things that pleased us upon arriving in Mallorca was the strong presence that ME_MMIX has achieved in Palma, a city where not only the streets are lined with posters announcing the festival’s concerts, but which also seems to have identified very positively with ME_MMIX, as shown by the turnout and the diversity of its audiences. This has resulted in a crossover between listeners of styles not usually found together in the same concert hall—something we consider one of the festival’s strengths for the future, thanks to the multiplying effect this call can have. For instance, regular audiences of electronic music might approach contemporary artistic creation, or those normally interested in techno might visit an audiovisual installation.
Of course, a major factor in this success is the festival’s founder and current artistic director, the Mallorcan composer Mateu Malondra, whose compositional ideas have shaped the festival, given his propensity for stylistic fusion and interdisciplinarity—traits often reflected in his scores and artistic projects. Hence the fluid relationship established between the different concerts and aesthetics featured in the 2025 edition of ME_MMIX, something far from trivial, as it is unusual for a festival with such stylistic diversity to achieve a reciprocal dialogue between these musical genres and to make them flow as they did in Mallorca, as if the festival as a whole were an artistic work in itself.
As Mateu Malondra had already pointed out in his interview with SCHERZO on 11 November, in addition to the concerts, the seventh edition of the ME_MMIX Festival offered a whole series of activities ranging from educational programmes to installations, as well as sector meetings, talks, and film screenings. Among the anniversaries celebrated was the centenary of Pierre Boulez, marked by the screening of Notations, a film by Austrian photographer and filmmaker Marion Kalter.
The closing concert of Thursday, 20 November was a true epitome of this fusion and interdisciplinary dialogue. Conceived as a tribute to another creator whose centenary, like Boulez’s, is celebrated in 2025 — the Mallorcan poet, essayist, and translator Josep Maria Llompart (1925–1993) — the Homenaje a Llompart took place in one of Mallorca’s most quintessentially Palmesan cultural centres: Can Balaguer, a cultural venue housed in a beautiful eighteenth-century Baroque palace that, in the twentieth century, came into the hands of Josep Balaguer i Vallès, a true Renaissance man who, among many artistic facets, developed an important career as a pianist and conductor, having founded the Orquestra Simfònica de Mallorca in 1946.
Few places could be more fitting for this concert than Can Balaguer, a building donated in its day to the City Council of Palma by Josep Balaguer himself for public enjoyment in cultural projects. Among its facilities, which include music rooms (one of them equipped with a superb organ that had already featured in the ME_MMIX Festival), Mateu Malondra selected the beautiful inner courtyard so characteristic of these Mallorcan palaces: an influence of Arab architecture which, centuries ahead of its time, anticipated what we now know as bioconstruction.
With the courtyard packed with people (including those who had to sit on the floor or stand, as attendance exceeded the organisation’s initial expectations), Homenaje a Llompart presented a guided improvisation jointly conceived by several Mallorcan creators: Mateu Malondra, composer and also responsible for the electronics; the writer and narrator Jaume C. Pons Alorda (curator of the Llompart Year), reciting poetry; the composer, writer, and singer Joan Miquel Oliver, on electric guitar; the percussionist Toni Toledo, on drums; and the artist Xavier Malondra, in charge of audiovisual creation and projection.
The diverse backgrounds of these musicians (in the case of Joan Miquel Oliver and Toni Toledo, prominent figures in Mallorca’s rock and indie scenes) were not an obstacle — quite the opposite — to producing that dialogue between styles to which we referred earlier in relation to the festival as a whole. Thus, techniques from progressive rock merged with methods typical of new music which, in the case of the electric guitar, may recall scores by composers such as Pierluigi Billone written specifically for the instrument, such as OM ON (2015) or the Sgorgo cycle (2012–13), with their continually dematerialising textures and glissandi constructed from roughness and noise.
Those glissandi were crucial at the beginning of Homenaje a Llompart due to another central aspect of this interdisciplinary improvisation: its strong links between music and image. Corresponding to the material flows proposed by Xavier Malondra in the large-scale projection we saw in the Can Balaguer courtyard, Joan Miquel Oliver, Toni Toledo, and Mateu Malondra offered music that was initially very tactile, with sound fraying and flowing like the sliding movement visible behind them. Behind them — and on them — as the projections passed across the Can Balaguer stage, turning the musicians themselves into both screen for the images and part of the image (as dark silhouettes) in the film reaching the courtyard wall behind them.
Thus, the musician appeared as both producing agent and audiovisual space, evolving with the image, whether in the aforementioned glissandi or in percussive techniques (the patches in the electronics, the drum kit itself, or the tapping on the electric guitar), or in those that aimed for a textural thickening of the trio. This ranged from the play with distortion pedals and the metal cylinder slide on Joan Miquel Oliver’s guitar strings to the loosening of a cymbal screw by Toni Toledo to produce a tenuto with greater metallic resonance (again linked to the most plasmatic film passages).
Other moments in Homenaje a Llompart presented more obsessive and repetitive musical links: a response to film sequences in which organic forms, proliferating like self-generated fractals with minimal variations, found their parallel in guitar, percussion, and electronics. These combined real-time improvisation with patterns predetermined to form the structural foundations of Homenaje a Llompart.
In its macrostructure, the first electroacoustic passages served as an instrumental prelude to the entry of the voice, with the torrential and intense recitation by Jaume C. Pons: a new prosodic–musical layer in itself. However, his was not the only recitation we heard in this improvisation, as offstage we heard the voice of Josep Maria Llompart himself reading two of his poems and one of his translations — multiplying the historical layers interwoven among the instrumental and electroacoustic strata. These echoes from the past were highly appropriate in the homage to the Mallorcan polymath, while shaping what the programme notes described as “a hall of mirrors on the inevitable resignification of the poem over time,” prompting “a dialogue between the original and the rereading, evoking the notion of eternal return and the transformation of the double.”
If the first passages of Homenaje a Llompart served as a prelude to the entry of the voices, those we heard after Jaume C. Pons left the stage acted as an epilogue or postlude in which motifs from the opening returned — closing a circular structure — in parallel with the reappearance, in the visual projection, of some of its founding images: those rivers of magma flowing, amalgamating times and artistic languages in the history of Mallorcan creation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This would not be a bad approach with which to articulate what we hope will be Palma de Mallorca’s bid for European Capital of Culture 2031, for which the Balearic city is currently a candidate, and among whose strengths the ME_MMIX Festival should play a significant part — expanding its format and serving, as this first evening attended by SCHERZO demonstrated, as a true meeting point between the arts around music, bringing together tradition and modernity.
Paco Yáñez
