Rocío Cano Valiño’s Intortus

The title of Intortus, a recent electronic composition by Rocío Cano Valiño, is a word used for a kind of cirrus cloud with twisted, seemingly entangled filaments. Even casual cloudwatchers know that these painterly wisps are shapeshifting storytellers; they may start out looking like contrails or skywriting, then turn into strands of punk-rock hair or a fireworks blast. 

 

In a similar way, Cano Valiño’s seven-minute micromontage moves energy around the space like a focused and curious wind, with precise sounds that flutter, hover, and whirr as they dart around and through each other. The listener is transported into a soundworld the composer describes as “imaginary, vaporous, effervescent, and even floating.” 

 

Clouds were a starting point, the Lyon, France-based composer tells me during a recent video call. “The idea of this work was to have different sound spaces, wider and tighter spaces, as if we are inside this type of cloud which has filaments that curve unpredictably,” she says. “I want the listener to focus on each sound that develops throughout the piece. Each transformation changes the perspective of the listener—I want them to be surprised!” 

 

Cano Valiño’s sound bank has expanded in the four years since our first conversation. In 2021, her composition Okno won first place in the 2020 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest and was the inaugural winner of Musicworks’ Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music / Prix Marcelle Deschênes pour la musique électronique, which is part of the EMC Contest. After receiving her master’s degree in contemporary composition from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse (CNSMD) in Lyon, she has been living the composer life: receiving commissions and distinctions, seeking studio residencies to complete her pieces, and serving on the artistic committee of Lyon’s Ensemble Orbis, which she co-founded. 

 

Intortus—which will be presented in concert at le Forum de la Création Musicale’s Bypass #11 in Toulouse, France, in November 2025—was created with sounds Cano Valiño has recorded over the years. She also recorded new sounds for this piece, and processed and transformed the sounds in DAW software and in MAX MSP.

 

“As a composer, I am interested not only in timbres and the diversity of sound colours, but also in the pulse and rhythmic combinations that introduce energy and contrasts,” she says. “Rhythm is for me the knot, the common thread, the genesis in my sound universe: for example, the idea of glitch, bug, granulation, timbric-rhythmic superposition that can also be found in the noises of machines.”

 

Cano Valiño, who was born in Argentina, has a background in interior design, which she draws from for collaborative projects—such as the scenography and 3D designs for composer Demian Rudel Rey’s 2022 chamber opera Qu'est-ce Que l’Amour. She fills notebooks with shapes to help her visualize her compositions.

 

Last year, Cano Valiño did a three-week residency in Monterrey, Mexico, where she worked on three mixed-media pieces that were performed by the local percussion ensemble Q-SIÓN. Earlier this year, she was commissioned by Radio France to compose a concerto for contrabassoon and ensemble; Fanguyo was premiered by Antoine Pecqueur (contrabassoon) and the Ensemble Linéa in February 2025 at Festival Présences.

 

In terms of new electronic compositions, Pirucha, her piece for quartet and electronics, will be premiered by the ensemble Proxima Centauri in December 2025 at La Marbrerie, Montreuil. This year, Cano Valiño has a residency at the studio of Belgium’s Musiques & Recherches, which is dedicated to the development of acousmatic music, to start composing Pyrocumulus, an electroacoustic piece that will premiere there in 2026. And she has also received a commission from GRAME Centre National Création Musicale in Lyon to write a piece for duo and electronics, which will be premiered by members of Ensemble Orbis.