velak-gala #146

La Cuerda y el Grito, translated as “The String and the Scream“ is a multidisciplinary performance that blends contemporary music, free improvisation, body, and object. Yuko Cornale and Sofía Escamilla work from a place of depth and in the quest for the intangible —each from a different language: one using the voice as a portal, the other through cello as an extension of the body. This duo is born from attentive listening and the willingness to inhabit the moment. While Yuko’s voice folds, distorts, and channels the intangible, Sofía’s cello expands through digital processing and sound objects.

A seismic encounter between two explorers of the deep who come together in a dialogue of sounds and emotions. Voice and cello merge and warp creating an intimate ritual where air becomes string, and string becomes scream.
Both artists were selected for the Ibermúsicas – Emilia Romagna call, with tours in Mexico and Italy alongside the trio HackOut!. In 2025-2026 they develop The String and the Scream.

https://youtu.be/pHerEUElENM?si=cnKiv1b45Gbi2_l0
https://youtu.be/uNkGsgRyEiA?si=33vL4tOX-augm

Yuko Cornale
Performer, improviser, composer, and producer born in Bolivia and of Italian nationality. Based in Mexico City for over ten years, her work focuses on vocal exploration and the use of extended techniques. Active in the experimental scene, she performs in free improvisation concerts and collaborates with contemporary music ensembles. She teaches private voice lessons and leads the Vox Anima workshop, which encourages vocal exploration and somatic knowledge of the voice.
She currently leads two main projects: Craniata, an immersive performance combining digital art, visual arts, electronic music, body, and voice; and Ensamble Voraz, a group dedicated to free improvisation with influences of black metal, doom, and noise rock. Her practice is driven by the exploration of the depths, channeling the intangible.

Sofía Escamilla
Cellist, composer, and sound artist Mexican who moves between contemporary academic music, free improvisation, performance, and electroacoustic music. Her approach to the instrument begins with the exploration of extended techniques with real-time digital processing, layering voice and other sound objects. Her work also spans multidisciplinary collaborations in poetry, dance, theater, and film. Notable collaborations include the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra 2023 as a composer selected for the Orchestral Techniques Workshop, and with the UNAM Choreographic Workshop 2025 as a live cellist. She is currently a member and founder of the free jazz trio Segaki, a member of Kóryma orchestra led by jazz pianist Ana Ruíz, and cellist in trumpeter and jazz artist Jacob Wick’s ensemble, with whom they recorded an album in 2025.

ErikM

Disappearing Words takes as its starting point the list of terms banned by the Trump administration — science-based, transgender, diversity, climate change… Entrusted to an AI-generated artificial voice, these words appear as a fragile memory, already under threat of erasure. Integrated into the Idiosyncrasie device, built from real-time sound streams and reconfigured raw materials, they enter a process of continuous transformation. Little by little, the voice blurs, dissolves, merges with the streams, and drifts toward entropy: a state where meaning fades, where sonic matter decomposes into an unstable and unpredictable field. Between memory and disappearance, Disappearing Words sets political language and its
manipulation against the fragility of any sonic trace, questioning the ways in which words can be erased, diverted, or rendered inaudible.

eRIkm (Aka Erik M) is a French musician, composer and visual artist. Since his first experience in the plastic and visual arts, ErikM takes the risk to escape any attempt of hasty categorization. Very quickly considered as a virtuoso of electronic devices and sound arts (1994), he crosses the worlds-systems called „independent“, „institutional“ and territories (France – International). He develops an openly prospective approach of the technological medium. He conceives acousmatic works
or composes mixed music for instrumental ensembles (Ensemble Inter contemporain, Phoenix Basel, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Dedalus…). He has collaborated with Luc Ferrari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Bernard Stiegler, Mathilde Monnier, FM Einheit, Will Oldham … and creates transversal works that constitute a singular kaleidoscopic vision and put in tension the intimate and the political, the popular and the learned.
www.erikm.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpW4fn8oP98

…more acts tba!