Roc Jiménez de Cisneros’ MAKINA TRAX unfolds as a free deformation of the mákina sound—a subgenre of Spanish techno, embraced by mass audiences yet marked as peripheral by class prejudice. Here, he bends, stretches, and fractures its fevered pulse into unstable rhythms, caught between propulsion and collapse.

The fast, hard-edged style of mákina emerged in Spain in the early 1990s, and it became a soundtrack for working-class and lower-income youth in Valencia, Barcelona, and beyond. 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, Roc asks what happens when a form already treated as marginal is pushed further toward the edges.

Note: Strobe lighting will be used in this performance.

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (b.1975, Barcelona, Spain) 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 been pushing 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.

This performance is Roc’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.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation

Artist Talk: 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. Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #1656. Thursday, October 9, 6 p.m. FREE / RSVP HERE.