The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Music Production Grant to Angélica Negrón for the release of her project, titled “Entreformas”.  

Entreformas is a new album of experimental ambient pop songs by composer and performer Angélica Negrón. The project explores shifting states of matter and being, inhabiting the spaces between natural and artificial, consciousness and unconsciousness, and silence and noise. The music unfolds within a lush sonic world that is dreamy, tropical, playful, and surreal.

At the center of the album is a newly created musical instrument and living sculpture developed in collaboration with botanical artist Sophie Parker. Parker transforms tropical flora, found objects, and paint into vivid plant sculptures. Painted leaves from the sculpture will trigger sounds through capacitive sensing technology, which allows conductive materials to function as touch sensitive instruments. These plant interfaces activate samples, textures, and vocals, while mechanical percussion modules designed by instrument builder Nick Yulman provide rhythmic elements.

The album features violinist and composer Darian Donovan Thomas, analog synthesist Phong Tran, and collaborations with students from Face the Music, who bring improvisatory energy and fresh perspectives. Drawing from lo fi sources including manipulated micro samples from Negrón’s orchestral and chamber works, fragments of Latin American ballads from her childhood, and field recordings from surreal environments such as the Sacro Bosco in Italy, the music creates a vivid sonic landscape where organic and synthetic elements are deeply entangled.

Angélica is a Puerto Rican composer and performer who writes music for voices, orchestras, ensembles and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. At the intersection of classical and electronic music, she blends unusual instruments, and acoustic, electronic and found sounds “to underscore the inventive sound world that she brings to her music...” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Rooted in her experience as a Puerto Rican artist living in the diaspora, her work explores migration, memory, absence, and belonging. Recent and upcoming projects include a cello concerto commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Yo-Yo Ma and Gustavo Dudamel, and The Puerto Rico Experiment, a song cycle for Roomful of Teeth and Balún commissioned by PAC NYC that examines Puerto Rico’s history as a site of political, scientific, and economic experimentation.

Her music has been commissioned and performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, and Sō Percussion. She has also created multidisciplinary projects with drag performers, filmmakers, botanical artists, and comedians.

Negrón was the first composer-in-residence at the New York Botanical Garden and has received honors including the Hermitage Greenfield Prize. Her screen credits include the HBO docuseries Menudo: Forever Young, the Netflix documentary Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, and Through Our Eyes for Sesame Workshop. Her arrangements can be heard on Rosalía’s acclaimed 2025 album LUX (Columbia Records).

A founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún, she lives in Brooklyn, where she looks for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.

Please visit Angélica’s Website and Instagram for more information.