Lineage

The first paid work was in a metallurgy lab, undergraduate, the kind of job where you learn that materials have moods. The second was tutoring physics over slow connections to students in territories the trains didn't reach. Both jobs taught the same thing — the math is real, the people are realer, and the only honest work happens where those two facts collide.

By 2016 the work had two shapes. One was an industrial engineering degree at Universidad de Concepción — slow, eventually thesis-bound to the question of how DIY collectives organize themselves when nobody is paying them to. The other was a music-tech startup called OndaSonora, co-founded with friends, seeded by the Chilean Ministry of Economy to build crowdfunding rails for artists the system kept forgetting. The same year, a non-profit — CAFCA — co-founded to put arts education into Chilean schools that had been waiting for it. The same year again, a classical singing scholarship — Carmina Burana, La Traviata, The Magic Flute — because the voice was always there in the background.

The freelance code work started in 2018 and never stopped. Python, simulation models, dashboards for researchers who needed the math to behave. The math behaved.

In 2021 a scholarship from Global Affairs Canada — Canada-Chile Emerging Leaders of the Americas — opened a door at Dalhousie University. The official version was operations research and supply chain modeling, in a faculty full of cold equations. The unofficial version was: spend a year in the Maritimes and learn what cold sounds like.

A year later the door opened again, this time into RadStorm Arts Collective — an artist-run community studio, door open most days, instruments where the desks usually go. The official title was Program & Studio Coordinator. The work was, more honestly, signal chains. Cables. Workshops. Drop-in hours. Co-leading the grant applications that brought in the venue. Participation up by a third over the run.

What that year taught — the room is the instrument. The microphone is just the door. Most of the field recordings in current rotation came out of that year. Bus stops in February. The harbour at four a.m. The studio when it was empty.

The engineering degree was conferred in August 2024. By then the practice had already moved. April 2025 — a Jazz Music Certificate from Humber. September 2025 — started a Bachelor of Music there. Jazz studies. Four years. Senior Peer Mentor on the side, supporting the first-year cohort through the same transition the practice itself was making.

The current shape is four threads under one moniker. The original work in English stays described, not named: hand-built, voice-led, acoustic bones with industrial instincts. Saramago is the songs in Spanish, piano-led, written long. Night Rush is the covers band: 80s power ballads for hire, full stage chops. Tropikill is the salsa one: Latin percussion, the floor as the point. Currently untethered. Live, the project does what the room asks for.

The pedalboard, in performance order — guitar, tuner, Boss VE-500, Neural DSP Nano Cortex, Boss RC-500, Zoom recorder. A small stack. Enough.