Let us invoke not comprehension but resonant attunement.

Carlos Monleón has been recording bells, ringings, toques. Bells mark meanings and moments across daily, weekly, and yearly cycles. They spell time—and also create territory: the space in which they are heard, reaching as far as they resonate.

During these distended bell tower recordings, the artist encountered a metaphor: the living carillon. This image made him want to bring these resonant territories into an interior space: the cave.

Cellular Bells sparks from a chimera: composing a living carillon, a passing metaphor in Uexküll’s* work when describing meaning in metabolism through musical terms: The stillness between heartbeats contains all possible rhythms.

Cellular Bells infolds the resonant territories of bells. Voices and metals perform in a cave that becomes a space of nested resonant chambers. The ringing follows and feeds frequencies as they vibrate and blend in the vocal tracts of rock and flesh. Self-tones merge into third bodies made of attunement. A soundscape where the cell does not occupy space but rather vibrates into being an acoustic territory, a sonic existential domain where cell membranes become eardrums.

In the cave, separation dissolves. Each sound belongs to all space simultaneously. Imagine these cellular bells arranged in ethereal towers within each living being—not randomly placed, but meticulously positioned according to an unseen score.

The territory is marked and navigated through tonal events.

The meadow, with its flowers and insects, is not a place, but a bell tower complex where countless carillons interact in harmony.

The bell is not struck; it is awakened from its dream of silence.

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*Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology and animal behaviour studies and was an influence on the cybernetics of life.

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Cellular Bells was recorded mostly during field trips across the Iberian Peninsula, in bell towers opened by the Campaneros de Madrid, as well as in caves with the Ars Vocem choir, led by musicologist and composer Isaac Diego García.

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Carlos Monleón (Madrid, 1983) works across various levels of bodily sensation and perception, from the (micro)biological to the performative and social. His main line of research follows evolutionary mechanisms that originate in digestion and cognition, resulting in the distribution of bodily processes across multi-species

networks and cybernetic metabolisms.This research takes shape through a dialogue between fields and contexts—urban/rural, science/craft. Predominantly collaborative in nature, he has developed projects at Seventeen Gallery and Autoitalia, London; CA2M, LCE, and Matadero Madrid; HIAP Helsinki. He has presented his solo practice at institutions such as LUMA Arles, Z33 in Belgium, the Tallinn Biennial, and the Istanbul Design Biennial, among others.

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Channelling. Be a vehicle. A path. A hole. Go. Let go. Make way for something to happen. Something, the other. Be others. Channelling is a series curated by Andrea González that explores the intersection of sound and other realms—logistics, infrastructure, landscape. As a practice, channelling takes many forms: tuning into unheard voices, sintonizar, attuning, transmitting. It is both method and metaphor, a way of connecting across spaces and systems.