Paula Sanchez uses performance to traverse the connections between sound, material, and improvisation. The cellist and vocalist refined her interdisciplinary approach through music studies at Argentina’s National University, improvisation at the Musik Akademie in Basel, and Contemporary Art Practice/Sound Art at the University of Art in Bern– and she has recently brought this training to her collaborative and solo projects that explore space and improvised encounters. Through Indoor compositions and decompositions, Sanchez experiments with noisy cello sounds recorded during COVID-19, and Spectrum: Ghost features an expansive improvisation with tenor saxophonist Tobias Pfister in the Köbánya cellar system in Budapest.
As a performance artist, Sanchez uses an embodied approach to sound and performance to engage a wide range of material objects and scales. This ranges from pieces like Effacement – where Sanchez’s voice intimately resonates in large glass jars to activate an electronic feedback loop – to mirrors, plastic, and glass in large-scale installation performances like Entregame el anzuelo de los días.
Sanchez’s latest release, Pressure Sensitive (Relative Pitch Records, 2025), returns to an evocative recorded session in Bern that used the cello, cellophane, and ring modulators to evoke the “erotic encounters of transparent asphyxiation.” Over the album’s six short tracks, Sanchez pulls listeners through waves of texture and abstraction in an intense and immersive sound world. Rapid shifts between chaotic crinkling cellophane and screeching cello harmonics open the album, evoking grinding teeth and vocal screams. The quiet and slower-paced tracks lure listeners into tepid calm with haunting breath-like noise and low-pitched drones. With a sensitive attention to mix and spatialization, Sanchez invites listeners to probe the limits of their perception as she finds the limits of her own body and sonic practice.
We caught up with Sanchez to discuss her creative practice, album release, and future projects.
What interests, experiences, and artistic skills shape the connections you draw in your interdisciplinary performance practice?
I think my practice was in some way shaped by the fact that I studied cello, but I always felt very out of place in classical music; at the same time I worked many years with an experimental theater collective where I was composing and performing, exploring both body and sound together. Years later, I discovered improvised music and it was a big turning point in my life. I realized that there was a place in the world for what I was doing.
Today, when I work with sound I like to move on the edges, I try to inhabit the undefined places of the artistic practices I carry out. I’m interested in creating frictions, and I have a tactile, erotic, and animalistic approach to my instrument. For me, sound is about presence, and performing is about trying to have an encounter with sound.
I was intrigued by how Indoor Compositions and Decompositions and Spectrum: Ghost focus on space and (dis)connection. How do you think about space and collaboration in your performance and recording projects?
I find the idea very interesting that space contains you; it is something that protects you and conditions you at the same time. Our sounds are always affected by space, and it’s a relationship that I’m interested in exploring creatively. In collaborations, something similar happens, where everyone brings their own sounds and experiences and tries to make music with that. Every time I get involved in a creative process with other musicians, I am affected in such a way that my playing changes, is enhanced, and enriched. Collaboration is very important, it is a way of sharing.
Similarly, in your creative practice and on Pressure Sensitive, how do you combine performance and electronics to develop relationships between instruments, your body, and various materials?
It usually happens that I find an object or some writing that says something to me, and I start from there. I look for the reactions that are produced when I put together dissimilar elements, and I let them tell me where to go. I test their limits and their fragilities, and I push them, I exhaust them. For each material there is a body, for each body there is a sonority, and I like to work with contrasting, uncomfortable, and inconvenient elements that can take me out of my ways of functioning. I feel drawn to put myself in danger.
While listening to Pressure Sensitive, I was captivated by the fragile spontaneity that characterizes your live performance within the immersive sonic space only a recorded album can provide. What opportunities do you find by producing both live performances and recorded versions of projects?
Albums have a process that allows me to work on them in a more compositional way. I think that the particularity of the format makes the music have a more conceptual approach. On the other hand, playing live is an important part of what I do, and what I like about it is that while playing improvised music, radical and wonderful things happen, when all of a sudden we are touched by sound, and we are having a shared sound experience.
Many of your bios end with the line: “Hers is the pure presence of an embodied sound which invents its relations as it makes its way into nothingness.” How do you interpret this idea as you reflect on your work, past, present, and future
This is something that is always changing for me, but lately, and for a while, I could say that I make what I do as a vital practice, and a way of keeping myself attentive and eager for what life has to offer. There are some fundamental ideas in my work that are related to the use of my body as a kind of guide and filter to produce sounds, and to detaching myself from my intentions of control and surrendering to what sound is. This is my attempt to create a language of my own, knowing that there are no safe places and all agreements are transitory, and that it is my duty to question them and destroy them, making new ones again and again.
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