LIMO

LIMO is CentroCentro’s concert series dedicated to roots music that also embraces experimentation as a way of passing on knowledge. LIMO features music from lots of different people and places, and if you enjoy listening to psychedelic music, vocal polyphony, rhythms that can leave you in a trance, free jazz, traditional music, Gregorian chant or even boleros, then this is right up your street.

This concert serie is curated by ULTRANESIA. For the 2024–2025 season, we invited Carme López, Adrián de Alfonso, Pankisi Ensemble, Tarta Relena, Ensemble Kassiani, Asmâa Hamzaoui and Bnat Tombouctou, Garazi Navas, Razen, Elshan Ghasimi, Lumpeks, and Lukas de Clerck.

Why is it called LIMO? Silt – ‘limo’ in Spanish – is a mineral sediment carried in suspension in river water. It is finer than sand, but thicker than clay. Thanks to its composition, silt makes riverbanks and river deltas some of the most fertile land known for planting.

To really understand what LIMO is all about, we need to resort to a fable that is in fact based on real events. Every year, when the banks of the Nile are flooded, the land is covered with silt. This is what sustained the civilisation of ancient Egypt from 6000 to 700 BC. In later times, it also sustained the Greek, Roman and Islamic empires. But in the mid-20th century, Egypt’s ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to provide the country with electricity by building the Aswan Dam, based on the American model in Afghanistan. Nasser enjoyed the support of the Soviet Union, which had also attached great importance to electrification since its inception. However, the concrete and the electricity prevented the silt from settling, which meant that plans had to be put in place to irrigate the land and provide electricity, but this deprived the water of its fertilising properties. Is the contemporary always sustainable?

Just like silt, music overflows its banks, carried along by geological, meteorological and migratory currents. When it comes to a halt, it fuels change, allowing new ideas to germinate that may seem like the ones that went before, but have new mutations. If music were silt, it would be in constant renovation, never breaking with its past. A flow of sound that refuses to acknowledge the artificial barriers of time. LIMO does not believe that music is a thing of the present or the past. That there is such a thing as cult music or popular music. Or that music is progressing towards the future. As if the future were a solid category. As if it hadn’t been cancelled. As if progress at the cost of turning a deaf ear to the earth wasn’t going to be the end of us all. Let’s not forget about silt. Let’s listen to it.