Miguel Álvarez-Fernández: Where does the title of the work come from?

Concha Jerez: The Whistling of the Iron Horse Crossing the Threshold of Paradise was created in 1995. At that time, we contemplated the issue of emigration in Europe. We wanted to make an imaginary journey of these emigrants through Europe, choosing the train as vehicle. The train, which the American Indians called "the iron horse", hence the idea of the title. This sound of the train as a means of transport is present throughout the work, because at that time it was normal to hear the sound of trains transporting not only emigrants, but also people to refugee camps, after the war in Yugoslavia and so many other wars. That is why this idea of the iron horse came up, and the whistling of the train crossing the threshold of paradise, that is, looking for new paradises in Europe, the United States or developed countries.

M.A.-F.: The coexistence of different sounds, some more musical and others closer to noise, together with the use of words (...) There are many languages in which the title has been translated and they parade through the piece.

José Iges: The train is at the origin of concrete music, which was the first radio music without instruments, and this is intended to be a piece for the radio. So, naturally, the attraction that the train has for us as a sound element, which is already in the first study of concrete music in 1948, is fundamental.

But we must not forget something else either, and that is that, among the trains that transported people in Europe, there were those that took Jews and other people to the Nazi extermination camps, in other words, that this movement of people by train is very rich, very varied and very terrible.

M.A.-F.: From 1995 to the present, the significance of immigration and emigration, correlative phenomena that have occurred in Europe and that have defined it, has not changed much... The problem has not evolved much, quite the contrary.

C. J.: When realizing the work, we started by doing interviews here in Madrid, and then a second important part in Paris. Here, in Madrid, it was more focused on associations of Senegalese or Moroccans, but also on a centre where there were aspiring exiles, to be taken in by the Spanish government to stay here because they had fled from their countries. However, in France we found at that time a great awareness towards immigrants. A rather constructive way of dealing with the issue of immigration at that time. We really thought that this could make sense in the future in Europe. We had an interview with the director of the Arab World Institute and he was already very clear about the problem of immigration, what was happening with fundamentalisms, what the origin was. We should not forget that in the 50s France had experienced the drama of Algeria.

There is a continuum in the work which consists of songs that come from very far back, songs of emigration, which we sought and found and which we also wanted to include to show in some way that this was not a new phenomenon, that for many reasons this situation of people emigrating in search of new horizons and better realities had always occurred. Even among these songs, there are many lullabies to sing to children.

M.A.-F.: How do the contents of your work transcend journalism? Chronicles and events that are part of a work of art. Perhaps the perspective of the present time in the aesthetic and artistic sense of the work allows us to re-listen to it in a different way and understand it in the context it is presented to us.

C. J.: We wanted to try to find out the reason for immigration and express it through the voice of the protagonists, until we found answers; for example, the case of a Nigerian woman who appears in the work, who goes so far as to say: "I don't want to be here. I want to be in my country, and I want to get up and see my family." That part that many people think is beautiful, like searching for other horizons - no. There are people who are worn out by that. Working on all these social issues, we have always avoided being scavengers.

J. I.: For me this is a work that is presented in the field of radio art, but it is also true that since I began my thesis in 1997 on radio art, I have defined categorisations of the different genres within this discipline and it seems that I have defined them in order to escape from that classification when I make works. And this work is really situated with difficulty within what. They are hybrid genres in the style of Ars Acústica; it is a work that is closer to certain aspects of radio journalistic genres. It allows itself to be poorly defined, although it is undoubtedly a radio work because it uses the resources of radio and because it aims to be communicative within that medium. But beyond that, the truth is that it fits difficultly into a specific genre.

M.A.-F.: The clarity of issues that could be a point of view of Spanish society; it is explicitly commented that the incidence of France is not comparable to that of Spain... They are perspectives that situate us in a certain place and time. I recall that testimony of the Nigerian woman "I thought Europe was something else" and that it creates a particular drama for Europeans in 2020.

C. J.: We wanted to be intimate with each character, that is to say, each character was a person we had in front of us, who was telling us what their position was and what their reality was. We couldn't worry about genres or stories, we didn't want to distort what they were telling us.

There is another part to the story that is the background: fanatic situations, Arab fundamentalisms, people singing on a train or a group of French gypsies having fun. People with other realities to try to make us see that not everything is black or white, that there is a multicoloured reality and that all this is also part of our own reality.

J. I.: There are issues that are not part of the work and that have more to do with methodology. Concha has done all the interviews in Madrid, because she has an empathy for that which I don't have. This approach to people that you can sense would not have been possible if she had not done it herself.

In the end, the thing is that, with all the materials we have, things start to emerge in a certain way because they cannot happen in any other way.