Some works of art remain, enduring over time, whilst others have faded away. Those that remain are the ones that, as Pierre Michon wrote, “are opaque and add opacity to the world”. These Galanianas are pieces of music for the space of the world in the twenty-fi rst century, but they could have accompanied so many other universes of creation in modern times. Hence, listening to them, I thought of certain paintings by Max Ernst and Dubuffet’s Matériologies and Texturologies with their phonetic jargon, but they also brought me back to the Torner of rocks and lichens, to Anselm Kiefer’s beautiful desolations, and to the chamotte lands of Tàpies. Thus become Galán and Galiana, in that pun between letters and secret affinities, mediums of the profound. This music that they now share is timeless, tempting us to penetrate the deep reality surrounding us, that which here remains distant but reverberates in the exile of the margins. These moments of memory and invention, wanderings beyond known sounds.

These are twenty-one pieces of music from the depths, which one believes are capable of evoking the magazine Minotaure in that 1934 issue that included the convulsive beauty—or it would not exist—illustrated with Brassaï’s photos of strange crystals and corals. These Galanianas carry sounds that come and go, shining in another time with subterranean precision, centres within a centre that meet the world in a hymn-like obsession, like those who rejoice in discovery. I think these musical pieces tell of moments of loss, elegies and sound havens, but at the same time they are a commemoration of the mysterious; they are evocation and straying, like an imperative to say, as if another true world were unimaginable. Listening, I remembered what Beckett said: “the world is divided between those who search and those who have renounced the search”.

Searchers indeed, Galiana and Galán believe uncompromisingly in music, because these Galanianas [and Microgalanianas] mute the world with their small, so mysterious moments, sonorous lux, like vortices of a motionless time where life is. In their being is this reserve of reverie that we listen to, immersed in a field of polar tensions between the motion of visible shadows and a void that inhabits the sounds. Like a mysterion that can be dealt with in a mystical experience, such fl ashes, walkers in the half-light along hanging paths and, all around, the murmur of the indiscernible. Like someone who heard another voice, coming from beyond, a distant place.

Abyss of sounds, it seems as if within these musics certain sayings remain joyful in their withdrawal, absolutely secret, irreducible to listening. Sounds of these Galanianas where discursive interferences abound, like someone attempting to unveil the secret inhabitant beneath the surface of the masks. A shift towards the limits, emulating someone who visits a remarkable country outside, an abyss and estrangement risking oneself on being outside of oneself.

But listen carefully. They found the courage to compose these songs, so they know that whoever composes does so in the name of a loss. Lost or rediscovered sounds that they rediscover in another time and off er up to that loss, perhaps restoring the illegibleness from which they come. Sounds like pulses, traces of something that remains stubbornly invisible. From this place in the world, let us listen to these condensed moments of beauty.

And, seated at the table, awaiting, the words of these Galanianas arise, as Breton expressed to Dubuffet. Let us consider that before us there is “a seat reserved for the angel”.