Trinity Site TRILOGY Project

Requiem · Transfiguration · Angels

 

A Sonic Memorial and Living Offering

The Trinity Site Project is a long-form sonic memorial dedicated to the Downwinders—New Mexican families who lived through the 1945 Trinity nuclear test and whose lives, land, and lineage were forever altered. The work unfolds through a trilogy of compositions—Requiem, Transfiguration, and Angels—each exploring a different facet of collective grief, transformation, and spiritual ascent.

• Requiem honors the lives lost and disrupted.

• Transfiguration navigates the passage from generational trauma toward renewal.

• Angels imagines guiding presences ushering the deceased and the grieving through layered realms of memory and release.

Through electroacoustic cello, ritual performance, and embodied storytelling, the project invites audiences into a space of acknowledgment, healing, and communion—with ancestors, with land, and with the stories carried through generations.

Wavetrails: Ceremony, Collaboration, and Downwinders Lineage

The Trinity Site trilogy premiered to an audience at WAVETRAILS 2025, a multimedia performance series in which two of the compositions—Requiem and Angels—debuted. On October 11th, just weeks before Día de los Muertos, Celloquacious (Keely), Quannumthrows (Michael Pino), and Gabriel Carrion-Gonzales gathered at WAVETRAILS in Fusion Theatre to honor the ancestors (including Michael's father, Gregorio) who witnessed the first atomic detonation on this land.

In a time when the veil felt thin, the performance became a continuation of the Trinity Site memorial:
a living offering for communities impacted—known, unknown, and too often unheard.

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Meeting at Michael Pino's Family Ranch, Pino Ranch, a Downwinders ranch in the years leading up to the event, rooted our purpose deeply. On this soil, we offered dance, music, and art like sunflower seeds—absorbing harm, transforming it into beauty. Performing inside a quadrophonic sound field, surrounded by dozens of panels hosting projections, felt like both an honor and a prayer: a call for healing for the Downwinders and for our Earth.

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WAVETRAILS hosted a powerful aspect of the Trinity Site project, bridging personal memory, community remembrance, and cosmic ritual into an immersive, multi-sensory experience.

Multimedia Performance: Generational Memory in Sound and Image

This twenty-minute performance is both a historical and futuristic narrative, told through Keely’s emotive electroacoustic cello compositions and through transformed archival visuals projected by Michael Pino. These images—taken by Pino’s father, Gregorio, who later died from cancer attributed to Trinity Site radiation exposure—carry a profound generational resonance.

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Using MadMapper, Pino manipulates these visuals until they shift and transfigure themselves, revealing unexpected abstraction and beauty. This visual metamorphosis parallels the intention of Keely’s composition Transfiguration, which traces the movement from darkness toward light as affected communities continue to heal their families, land, and futures.

Keely and Gabriel have stayed at Pino Ranch in Carrizozo, NM, where Michael’s father lived during the Trinity detonation, performing these works on the land itself during ceremonies dedicated to healing. Keely's Melodius Ceremonia partner, Elizabeth Marie Berry (Eli del Puerto) performed a musical limpia of the family's historic jacal with Keely and adds atmospheric vocals and weaves electronics to create more dimension and textures to Keely's compositions. These offerings root the project not only in memory but in ongoing lineage—an audio-ritual communion between land, story, and sound.

A Living Memorial

The Trinity Site Project is a story that needs to be heard, seen and felt:
a collective effort to grieve, honor, transform, and reclaim. Through cello, movement, electroacoustic landscapes, archival imagery, and ceremony, the work invites audiences into a listening space where history, ancestry, and futurity converge. It is both remembrance and invocation—a call to witness, to feel, and to heal.