If you’ve ever played in a band, you’ll know that the percussionists are, by far, the most long-suffering ones. After years of loading and unloading drums, barrels, pots, tubes and all kinds of objects that share the fact that they cannot be comfortably carried under one arm, Nilo Gallego has increasingly yearned to get rid of all those weights and focus deeper and deeper on listening to everything happening around him.

“Everything we do is music,” said John Cage. And Nilo might add that the body itself is the instrument. That’s not only because we can tap rhythms with our hands and feet, but because the simple act of listening (such a mystery, listening!) is something we do with our bodies. Orelles voladores is a percussion concert in which Nilo doesn’t physically play any instrument. Instead, he gets us to form a percussion orchestra just with our eardrums, with listening as a drumstick.

Every change in music history has taught us new ways of listening. With jazz we discovered that drums sound different if we play them with a mallet or a brush. Digital editing has taught us to discern sounds that our brain had learned to ignore. In Orelles voladores, Nilo draws on his own experience as a percussionist and sound engineer to propose a new kind of solfège and a new way to strike the right note, and does so with the utmost simplicity and honesty. Because every sound that reaches our ears has bounced off and been filtered by all the materials that he has gathered, and together they tell a story. And it’s a story that we have learned to ignore over the years but which this piece invites us to reclaim.

After the family workshop that he did last year at the TNT, this year Nilo has a residency and is capturing his experiences and reflections in a show that not only gets us to listen a different way, but that also questions what performance is all about, not unlike Un cos sense talent by Monte Isla, Spooky by María Jurado and Alberto Cortés’ Analphabet.