LAUTARO MANTILLA, DMA is a guitarist, composer, and improviser from Bogotá, Colombia. In his performances, he typically combines guitar, extended vocalization techniques, and homebuilt electronics to create music that is both viscerally affecting and conceptually rigorous. Based in Boston, Lautaro is active in the NY and Boston music scenes and is a faculty member of the Contemporary Musical Arts department at New England Conservatory (Boston).
Lautaro holds a Bachelor’s degree in Classical guitar from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (Colombia), a Master’s in guitar and improvisation and a Doctorate in composition, both from New England Conservatory (Boston/USA)
Selected Press
“Lautaro Mantilla’s uncomfortable but moving “Bravement” for 13 sopranos and as many light bulbs, which plays on themes of community, censorship and self-expression through wordless humming, sighs and other vocal gestures. For most of the piece, the singers face away from the audience, with the effect that the sound seems to emanate not from individual mouths, but from a field of “resonant bodies.”
“ Above is a live performance, at the New England Conservatory, of Van Nostrand's Voyage in a White Building I, a wildly fractured setting of the first part of Hart Crane's poetic cycle Voyages; ... The spellbinding vocalist is Lautaro Mantilla, dressed in the video as a newscaster reporting the end of days.”
“In “Bravement,” for choir and obbligato light bulbs, Lautaro Mantilla did away with words altogether, creating a kind of vocal installation on the themes of sisterhood and silence. Eerie, electrifying and curiously moving, it fitted well into an evening that soldered together the archaic and the experimental.”