Ins Offene is the portrait CD of the composer Lula Romero, built around three extended works for instruments or voices with live electronics. Timbres, lines and textures change continuously, and the acoustic parts merge with the electronics into fluctuating, almost surreal soundscapes. Space is the central idea: Romero treats it as part of the composition itself, tied to musical structure and to the sound material.
Three groups of performers share the disc. The Zafraan Ensemble, conducted by Premil Petrović, plays the title piece with Romero herself at the live electronics. The ensemble Vertixe Sonora performs the cycle die Wanderung with Luc Döbereiner on electronics. The vocal piece is sung by the sopranos Aki Hashimoto and Silke Evers and the alto Noa Frenkel, conducted by Detlef Heusinger. Lukas Nowok, Thomas Hummel and Constantin Popp handle the sound direction. The recordings were made with Deutschlandfunk and the SWR Experimentalstudio, together with the German Music Council. Romero is a Berlin-based composer. She took her master's degree in composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague with Gilius van Bergeijk and Cornelis de Bondt, and in 2021 completed artistic doctoral studies in Graz under Clemens Gadenstätter.
In the electronics, sometimes transforming the instrumental sound and sometimes producing sound of their own, the main task is to construct space. ins Offene (2013), for ten instruments and live electronics, is described by Romero as an ensemble installation, an attempt to superimpose different spaces and blend them. die Wanderung (2016-17), for solo instruments and live electronics, is a cycle in six parts lasting over half an hour. A reduced sound material travels through different states, sections and instrumental spaces. Entmündigung (2015-16) is written for two sopranos, alto and live electronics.
Romero's methods range widely, from rule-based composing techniques to aleatoric elements, and from these she builds complex musical structures. The disc runs to more than 75 minutes and gives a broad view of how she binds acoustic writing, electronics and the listening space together. This portrait CD came to her as an award of the German Music Council. She also won the GIGA-HERTZ production prize of the ZKM and the SWR Experimentalstudio in 2014, and since 2023 she has played modular synthesiser in the Swiss Ensemble Orbiter.
CD, Wergo WER 6429 2, released in 2019 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik.
