Toni Castells

Early Music Career

Castells entered music school at the age of five, where he studied classical guitar, clarinet and piano, as well as musical composition. He toured Europe multiple times as a member of several youth orchestras. By the age of 12, Castells started his first band Korrefok, a folk-rock band where he wrote the music and played the keyboards. After winning local band competitions, the band was signed by AZ Records under the name Herzia. Their debut album, Coses que Passen, was released in 1999. At the age of 14 he won the III Young Composers Competition, organized in St. Joan de Vilatorrada (Barcelona), with his experimental composition “Images.”

London and momo

In 2000, Castells moved to London, where he worked as a sound engineer for Jose Maria Cano of the Spanish pop group Mecano. He subsequently worked as a recording engineer at the Royal College of Music, and now lectures in Music Technology at the London College of Music and Imperial College London.

In 2006, Castells started momo, a music project that merges the varied influences of classical, pop, opera, electronica and poetry, along with performances that combine the music with visual arts. momo's debut Unharmed was first released digitally in 2007. Featuring the vocals of Spanish singer Elisabeth Rodergas (better known as Beth), the album reached the iTunes Top 20 download charts. Castells founded Instant Attraction Records as a vehicle for releasing momo's music, and subsequently released Unharmed as a physical release, along with several more albums over the years.

Life from Light (2012)

'Light from Life' is a video-opera that premiered at the Union Chapel in London on November 15, 2012. While it largely takes the form of an opera, Castells has integrated the operatic components with contemporary and pop music in order to deviate from the traditional operatic form. The settings include the use of video art. The work also features some graphic depictions of sex, as well as lines taken directly from Wikipedia pages on the subject of sex. The piece revolves around the Charles Darwin quote "the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity". The central theme of the work also revolves around sexual intercourse, with the goal of providing a level of sex education that can appeal to youth in different cultures. After the debut of the opera in London the piece began to tour in other parts of Europe and Asia.

'Life from Light' was readapted in 2014 by invitation of Tete-a-Tete Opera and, sponsored by the Arts Council England, was performed over two nights at London’s Kings Place Hall One in August 7th and 8th 2014.

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal? (2016)

‘2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal?’ is the follow-up work to ‘Life from Light’ that premiered at St. James’s Piccadilly in London on July 6, 2016. A private performance was held at Cowdray Park on July 9, 2016. Again the composer deviates from the traditional operatic form combining operatic voices with elements of popular music, downtempo electronica and sound art. The piece was written for soprano, countertenor, piano trio and mixed choir and features sonifications of light curves captured by NASA’s Kepler space observatory.

“2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal” was originally an article published on Time Magazine in 2011 by Lev Grossman. The article features computer engineer and futurologist Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google Inc., describing the advent of Technological Singularity, a new era in which man and machine will finally merge allowing us to prolong life indefinitely, effectively making man immortal. Through this paradigm of the future Castells explores our bad relationship with death and the efforts of our technocratic society to overcome it. Through the piece this view is juxtaposed to the one of philosopher Alan Watts who in his teachings argued that in nature’s game there’s a purpose to dying, that it is not natural for us to wish to prolong life indefinitely and that the idea that death is a terrible thing is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers. Castells states that the piece allowed him to overcome his own fear of death.

Music, Art and Philanthropy

Castells has been involved a variety of events that combine music, art and philanthropy. He created Buy Music, Get Art in 2008. For the project, held at Maddox Arts in Mayfair, pieces of contemporary art were sold as the covers of limited edition CDs. Another Castells project was Love in the Sky. Launched on June 30, 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the exhibition featured collaborative works from a collection of artists, which were auctioned off that night to benefit Coram, a charity for underprivileged children. More than £8,000 was raised. He is also the founder of Xmas Rocks for Charity, an annual concert at the Notting Hill Community Church to raises money for Depression Alliance and the Mood Foundation.