tamborileñas

Tamborileñas is a surreal song cycle rooted in Tamboril, a real town, but one that exists now only in memory. Not my family, not my innocence, not the passion fruit trees I once thought I discovered remain.

Across six songs, memory bends into dream logic: familiar yet uncanny, tender yet twisted. It’s not about nostalgia, but about what memory does when left alone—how it loops, mutates, skips, and insists. Ghosts wear sandals, voices return in fragments, and everyday life spills into the absurd.

Dark, humorous, and painfully human, Tamborileñas traces the intersection of memory, pop culture, and folklore through stories of love, vengeance, and loss. Serving as a demo for my larger opera Whenever We Are, the work reimagines Dominican everyday life as an emotional kaleidoscope, half nightmare, half lullaby.