About

There are books you read in silence and books that ask for a dance floor. When I read Bolero Techno, Abraham Truxillo’s book, I knew it was the second kind: its poems already carried music inside them. There is a sleepless bolero, a folk song of poverty, a ballad for Peter Pan, a dub that tumbles in the sea. I wanted to bring that music to the surface and turn the book into a work of electronic literature.

In May 2025 I chose twenty-seven poems from the book and, for each one, imagined a sound: the genre, the rhythm, the arrangement, the mix, and the type of voice. With those decisions I wrote the artificial intelligence prompts that generated the music, and then turned each song into a video. That is how pieces were born that range from bolero and mambo to salsa and ranchera, from punk, ska, and dub to corridos tumbados, slam, the music of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and electronic music.

In October 2026 I designed and built this website to bring it all together. Here each poem has a second body: you can listen to the song and, just below, read the full poem in its original Spanish, with the spacing and indentation Abraham gave it on the page. Next to each poem is its sound sheet: the AI prompt the music came from, so the process stays visible alongside the work.

Bolero Techno is electronic literature. Poetry leaves the printed book, passes through artificial intelligence, circulates on digital platforms, and asks again who the author of a work is, what language is made of, and how a poem reaches its readers today… and its listeners. It does not replace the book: it expands it. It takes it out dancing.

Since 2024, individual poems, mostly by classic authors, have been turned into AI-generated songs and shared online. As far as I have been able to document, Bolero Techno is one of the first works to take a poetry book already in print, by a living author and with his approval, set it to music with artificial intelligence, and turn it into a work of electronic literature.

In 2026 the work was selected for the tenth edition of El Aleph. Festival de Arte y Ciencia at UNAM, which, under the theme New Narratives, reflected on the challenges of the present, among them the role of artificial intelligence. Mexico City, 2026.

By the way, Abraham and I are married ♥

Lidya Cota, Mexico City, 2026