Carlota is an electronic music producer, live performer and DJ based in Berlin, Germany. Raised amidst the natural environment of the Balearic islands, she incorporates a highly visual approach to production, weaving the subtleties of emotion and memory into vivid sonic excursions.
After obtaining a degree in sound engineering, Carlota gravitated towards modular synths as her machines of choice. Since then, she has devoted her workflow to exploring the outer reaches of generative sound production, intuitively guiding her tools with both a refined sense of control and respect for their autonomy. Employing a musical philosophy that is governed by improvisation, spontaneity and intuition, Carlota’s sonic imprint takes us down the most abstract of rabbit holes - constantly searching for the weird and wonderful, with results that often evade formal description.
Following a number of highly acclaimed appearances on трип Recordings - which culminated in her 2020 debut solo EP The Bow - Carlota continues to interrogate the artistic potentials of sonic machinery with boundless curiosity. Aesthetically, her sound reflects the infinite power of the machines used to make them. Radiant melodic leads wander through complex rhythmic structures - much like colourful wires spiralling around a modular synth - whilst zoning in on a peculiar combination of cross-rhythms and looping motifs.
Drawing upon a compositional approach that sits somewhere between live improvised jazz and phase-shifting minimalism, Carlota distills abstract ideas with remarkable clarity to convey that which cannot be put into words. And by isolating these stranger moments, she reminds us of their transcendent potentials.
Set at night in a Brooklyn laundromat, three young women in their twenties are doing their laundry, oblivious to one another. While they wait, the laundromat triggers them to remember moments they experienced in the space. As their laundry swirls endlessly, each of them is confronted with a defining emotional conflict regarding sexuality, tradition, family or death.
Written and Directed by Margot Roussel Produced by Margot Roussel and Janne Ebel Director of Photography: Janne Ebel Production Designer: Luis Marcilliano Edited by Emily Cohn Sound Mixing: Jacopo Penzo Score: Carlota Marques
Kitmun is a Berlin based electronic music duo composed of Stephane Lefrancois and Carlota Marques. They explore the DIY culture and constant aural and visual expression of modular synthesizers.
Kitmun is quickly becoming a staple of the Berlin modular scene, with performances at Oscillate parties, Sacred Ground Festival and Superbooth, as well as workshops at world renowned Schneidersladen, where they detail their methods and approach.
Ranging from ambient, afro beat to jungle and techno, their musical language is linked up with a moody swinging electronic jazz vibe, combined with analog visuals, in complete synergy with the music.
Ali M. Demirel and Carlota Marques have engaged on a different realm of projects. Their first collaboration started with KUYU a 3-channel video installation inspired by Metin Erksan turkish movie “Kuyu”. The piece was exposed at ACUD gallery and Apartment Project Gallery during CTM festival in 2017. In 2018, the work was installed at ARTER Istanbul. Simultaneously, the duo performed at IKSV Salon for Istanbul Film Festival where Ali remixed the original footage from the movie “Kuyu” and Carlota played a live soundtrack on her modular synthesizer system.
“Un Peso” is the story of children who dive in the sea with an aim to find coins thrown away by the tourists waiting for boats in the city of Acapulco, Mexico. Acapulco, a fashionable city frequented by Hollywood stars and wealthy Americans in the 1950s and 60s. Having lost its former glory, the city is regarded together with Guerrera region’s drug cartels, news of violance, stories of youth and women have been lost or killed. They had migrated from Costa Chica, across the border between Guerrero and Oxa, to live on coins which they collect from the sea in the erstwhile famous Acapulco. Children keep coins inside of their mouths during swimming. The innocent image of children floating in the water, almost like dancing, seems to cover up for the widespread violence and economic inequality in the city, but it also reveals it.Öğrenci recorded the diving children encountered by chance in Acapulco during her stay in Mexico in 2015 for the De Las Fronteras Biennial.
Soundtrack by Carlota Marques Un Peso, video, HD, 4’55”, 2018
A fisherman’s net catches something bigger than expected, bringing up the troubles from his past. Set at a secluded bay in the Mediterranean.
Written, Produced and Directed by Iva Fischer
Co-Produced by Heike Fischer, Bob Dooner, China Edelman
Cinematography: Alessandro Ubaldi
Edited by Eitan Dorfman and Romola Davies
Sound: Nico Bondi
Sound Mixing: Carlota Marques and Stephan Le François
Score: Carlota Marques and Stephan Le François
Your destination is a short film dedicated to visually suggest the restless illusory trap that the human mind tends to fall into every time the personal preferences of the character become part of a future goal that appeals to be more relevant than the heart of the present moment. The delusive outer search of Love and Self leads the character in an ever-deepening disconnection and confusion controlled by materialistic objects. Once the character comprehends that the destination happens right before the eyes, we can see the momentum of becoming one, realising the greatness in the abstract of growth from within.
Written by Iva Fischer and Carlota Marques
Directed and Animated by Pawel Walendowski
Produced by Iva Fischer and Studio Variat
Puppet Design and Build: Kinga Kindraczuk
Edit and VFX: Robert North
2D Animation and Edit: Mario Radev
Music: Carlota Marques
Every January to March the Bulgarian countryside becomes an arena of folkloric ritual mumming, locally know as kukeri or survakari. During the performance, masked dancers, dressed in animal skins and dangling bells, go from house to house to deliver invocations of abundance, scaring away evil and inviting in the good.
трип recordings refers to ‘Happy New Year. We Wish You Happiness, as a "fantastical celebration of the new”. The denotation of the release marries beautifully with the old pagan tradition that could conceptually connect to the celebration of electronic dance music.
What drives both ‘celebrations’ is dance and chants intertwined with noise. As a form of expression or release of a certain retained energy, paving space for a new one. Whether it be emotional release, have deeper social meanings or simply be physical. These are all open for interpretation and indirectly present.
The Video for ‘Noise Psychosis’ takes the shape of a tale of community set in Brezhani, rural Bulgaria and is driven by the curiosity of a young girl's interest in a traditionally male practice. It plays with themes of belonging and determination, however is weighed out by the hypnotic dance and movement of the kukeri. The film entirely takes a documentarian approach, staying authentic to its setting and protagonists.
Artist: Carlota
Director: Iva Fischer
Assistant Director: Anina Youroukova
Director of Photography: Alessandro Ubaldi
1st AC: Nico di Guida
2nd AC: Gergana Bozhanova
Producer: Vera Mayskaya
Co-Production: B2Y, NuBoyana (Bulgaria)
Local Fixer: Petar Milanov
Editor: Benedikt Strick
Colorgrading: Daniel Pallucca
Cast: Polina Blagova & her family: Georgiy, Georgiy Junior, Aneliq, Tatyana, and all the Kukeri dancers
Synchronicity at its finest, Carlota Marques and Iva Fischer met creatively in Berlin, 2014, although they both grew up simultaneously in Ibiza but never coincided. A collaborative spirit has woven in and out as a result of their friendship and the similar roots shared.
The divergence in their practice and their responses are connected to social and cultural anthropology of our day. Exploring the dichotomies and analogies in their works, the artists embody two opposite poles, tempering each other’s fixations– Marques’ as the music composer, captivation with the wild with Fischer’s as the film director, fascination with control.
While Marques often takes a philosophical outlook to developing concepts about the human and the celestial of man’s evolution. Fischer juxtaposes wilderness with control, prevailing a more realist-based methodology.
"The adventurers this time are a mix of label regulars and newcomers, with the latter giving a particularly strong account of themselves. It'd be pretty mind-bending to hear the arrangement transitions in Carlota's "Your Destination" on a big soundsystem. The track slinks through three different sections, bringing to mind the unhinged end of Ricardo Villalobos. Her second contribution, "Noise Psychosis," sounds the way a big modular system looks: tangled, colourful and bewildering. These tracks seem to be the first released music from the Berlin-based artist, who's also one half of the live modular duo Kitmun. She feels like an excellent fit for Trip."
"Spanish producer Carlota, one of three newcomers to the label, alongside Buttechno and Snazzy, shares this sense of absurdity. Her two tracks, the outstanding “Your Destination” and the chilling “Noise Psychosis,” may be darker than Buttechno’s screwy electronics, but they are so deviously twisted in their execution, riffs melting and mutating like phantoms in an electronic house of mirrors, that they both delight and disorient. The result is a kind of chilly, metallic psychedelia, rooting the genre in the frozen steppes of Siberia rather than San Francisco’s Summer of Love."
