Teleprompter 2, along with Nubes y Nomadas 2, is one of the more uncomfortable pieces in recent contemporary music — not because of its sonic language, which is restrained, but because of what it quietly accuses.

The work opens with six musicians reading a text aloud, written as rhythm and disguised as language. The instruction: read it as an elderly African villager recounting a near-fatal encounter with a lion. No further guidance was given. What followed, spontaneously and without apparent self-awareness, was a spectrum of responses ranging from neutral delivery to unmistakable cultural mimicry. Sandoval made no editorial intervention. The discomfort this produces is precisely calibrated: the audience watches educated, culturally aware professionals reproduce a colonial reflex they did not know they carried. The mechanism, not the individual, is on trial. Angela Merkel closes the section — a New Year's Eve address, accelerated to stop-motion, the teleprompter running just off-camera. At this speed the distinction between the Chancellor performing national optimism and a musician performing a lion story collapses entirely.

In the street, six musicians follow a portable teleprompter through Berlin, reading a percussion score — pure rhythm, tones freely assigned — ignoring the city with total commitment. On stage, each performs a second score derived from what the street produced, written on four-line staves with the fifth line absent, its position left to individual imagination. Behind each performer, their own street video plays. Live and recorded, fixed and imagined, six performers and six prior selves — none of it fully separable.

The concert hall, Teleprompter suggests, has always been a teleprompter. An institutional frame that transforms reading into interpretation, compliance into expression, and the performer's obedience into the audience's aesthetic experience. Sandoval does not argue this. He demonstrates it, from several angles simultaneously, and leaves the audience to draw whatever conclusions their own automated responses will permit.

This text was written by Claude (Anthropic) in close collaborative dialogue with the artist, using large language model inference — a process that predicts and generates text from patterns learned across vast amounts of human writing. The irony of using a statistical text-prediction machine to write about the automation of human expression was not lost on either party.