Ramon Sender (courtesy of Luis Olano)
Ramon Sender Barayón: A Pioneer in Music & Memory An interview with Filmmaker Luis Olano By Sebastiaan Faber
Ramon Sender Barayón is a pioneer of US counterculture and the son of Amparo Barayón, who was killed by fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and the novelist Ramón J. Sender. A new documentary by Luis Olano sheds light on his remarkable life.
R
amon Sender Barayón, born in Madrid in 1934, is a pioneer of American counterculture and a fixture of the San Francisco art and music scene. A composer, visual artist, and writer, he was the co-founder, in 1962, of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which later became the Mills Center for Contemporary Music. Together with Don Buchla, Sender designed one of the world’s first music synthesizers. He is also the
son of Ramón J. Sender, a prominent Spanish novelist who fought in the Civil War and spent almost forty years in exile, and Amparo Barayón, a pioneering feminist who was assassinated by the Nationalists in her native Zamora in October 1936. Ramon Sender’s book Death in Zamora (1989) is a memoir of a son’s investigation of his mother’s politically motivated murder. This fall, NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center screened Sender Barayón:
Viaje hacia la luz (Sender Barayon: Trip toward the Light), a new documentary by Luis Olano. A descendant of Spanish Civil War exiles, Olano was born in 1986 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He’s lived in Spain since 1991. How did you first run across Ramon Sender? It was during a trip to California in 2014, at the suggestion of the journalist Germán Sánchez. Sánchez, who March 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 9