Valencia, 2026: the time that is heard

Present, past and future not as a line, but as a single pulse that feeds back on itself.

Valencia no longer sounds the same as it used to. But perhaps it would be more accurate to put it another way: Valencia is being heard differently. And when a city changes the way it is heard, its time changes. Not clock time, but that intimate time that governs attention, desire and memory. The time that inhabits us.

The experimental — that word that is sometimes confused with the difficult or the minority — no longer functions here as a label. It functions as a condition. As a state of the world. As a language. And if the Valencian sound scene is consolidating year after year, it is not only because it is growing in number or variety, but because it is beginning to generate something rarer: a continuity that does not depend on chronology. A continuity that does not move ‘forward’, but rather folds in on itself, repeats itself, rewrites itself, activates itself.

In Valencia, the past is not left behind. The future is not ahead. The present is not a point between two extremes. Everything happens at once, as if the city had found a way to experience time in an alternative way: a fertile loop where each new proposal reinterprets what has already been experienced and prepares what does not yet exist.

That is, in essence, what sound does when it becomes serious: it does not adorn the world, it reorganises it.

In 2025, for example, the Super·lab cycle and the Sono·lab laboratory at Las Naves consolidate sound experimentation as a public infrastructure, as a place where sound is not programmed just to be heard, but to be investigated: art, technology and advanced creation linked in a single gesture. But by calling it ‘innovation’, we are not just talking about the new. We are talking about the ability to imagine differently. Because innovation, here, does not mean ‘the latest’. It means what does not yet have a name.

And yet, while all this is happening in the institutional present, the past returns — not as nostalgia — but as a form of energy. In France, institutions such as IRCAM and GRM have demonstrated for decades that experimental music can be sensitive science, a way of constructing thought from sound. That legacy, far from feeling distant, comes as a living flow: an echo that feeds the now. Not as a copy, but as a resonance. The same is true of technological research and computational composition spaces such as CCRMA (Stanford) or laboratories where music is studied from the brain, such as BRAMS (Montreal): places that have turned listening into radical research.

The Valencian scene, as it consolidates, is not moving ‘towards that’. Rather, it is doing something else: it is making that happen here, in its own way. It integrates it without obeying it, it transforms it without repeating it. As if the city had understood that contemporaneity is not achieved through imitation, but through the creation of context.

This is where CISMA.art comes in, as an energy that does not merely present, but connects. CISMA works with transdisciplinarity as a real place: where art forms converge, contaminate each other, transform each other. And here time folds back on itself again: because transdisciplinarity is not a recent fashion, but an ancient necessity that is now becoming urgent. Each intersection is a rebirth. Each collaboration turns the present into a strange mixture of something that already existed and something that does not yet exist. It is neither past nor future: it is a third time.

And then a night like 17 January 2026 happens at LaLenta. The performance by Trío Truna (Andrés Blasco), organised in collaboration with CISMA, was not just an excellent concert: it was a scene where time felt like it had come together. What you hear in a room like this is not just sound: you hear community. You hear a collective story that does not need to be written down to exist. LaLenta established itself as a centre for exhibition and convergence of synergies because it embodied something essential: that experimental art does not survive solely on novelty, but on its ability to become a place. A place where experiences accumulate, where what happens happens again in another form.

Photo:"Mónica Real" Trio TRUNA, LALENTA, Valencia 17/01/2026.

And if we look at other nearby territories, such as Riba-roja del Túria, we see another manifestation of the same phenomenon: the scene ceases to be a point and becomes a network. When the experimental leaves the centre and finds new nodes, time expands again. It no longer depends on a date or an agenda: it depends on circulation. On the possibility of a practice being replicated without becoming routine. Of the future appearing as continuity, not as a leap. That is why, when we think of laboratories around the world — from Europe to the United States, from Latin America to China and Asia — it is not appropriate to see them as ‘more advanced places’ on a path that must be followed. It is better to see them as something different: alternative forms of the present. Places where what we still believe to be the future is already happening.

 And in that vision, Valencia would not be ‘late’ to anything. It would be entering the real rhythm of the contemporary world: a rhythm where everything happens at once, in layers, in echoes, in returns.

Sound teaches this better than any theory: a vibration never travels in a straight line. It bounces, reverberates, returns, mixes with other waves, transforms in the air, produces invisible geometries. The time of sound is not the time of official history. It is a circular, spiralling, living time. A time where the past returns as material and the future appears as a variation.

Valencia, in 2026, is consolidating an experimental scene precisely because it works like this: like a reverberation. Like a present that feeds on the past without remaining in it, and that generates the future without promising it.

It is not a timeline.

It is an alternative.

And perhaps that is the most contemporary definition of a living cultural scene: not to advance, but to vibrate. Not to pursue ‘the new’, but to create conditions for the new to be reborn again and again, from within.

Valencia not only sounds different.

Valencia is learning to inhabit a different time.

And in that time — where listening is thinking — perhaps lies the most human form of future.

Since the beginning of my artistic career, I have tried to build bridges between the different disciplines of knowledge that interest me in order to express myself coherently in my proposals. This has led me to delve into new techniques for relating different communication methodologies, deepening my knowledge of various subjects at every step and developing a language that is now my own, with a well-defined character. The light and movement in my works refer not only to visual perception but also to a sensory perception that attempts to approach sound and vibration, clarifying what is on display and leaving a new door open to visitors to my work.

Coming soon RIBA-ROJA de Túria 31/01/2026 E CA, INT3R ACCION3S