What first got you into music? Your latest album, ‘Caverna’, has textures and sounds as diverse as ambient and Ecuadorian traditional music.
I started making electronic music because I was a huge fan of NAAFI’s records, producers like Siete Catorce, Lechuga Zafiro, and I when I started listening to them I thought, “Wow, electronic music is amazing and can sound really local.” This was I’d say about eight years ago. But first I started making rap beats, which I loved. I couldn’t just make an album, so I went with rap. Chopping up beats, sampling, this kind of stuff. I did that until I learned how to develop my own sound, something that I wanted to sound very Ecuadorian. When I was in school, I used to go to a lot of metal band concerts in Quito, bands that I loved, and that’s when I started playing guitar like crazy, like really intensely. I loved it. When I went to university, I studied sound engineering and music production, and I always wanted something heavier. But the only bad thing about metalheads is that they’re a bit narrow-minded. And some friends gave me a cracked version of Ableton Live and said, “This program is going to change your life”
This sort of narrow-mindness to some metalheads is a phenomenon quite common in Latin America, especially as these fans grow older. But that also happens in electronic music. You mentioned that you didn’t know electronic music could sound local. Why?
In Quito, electronic music is super elitist, and the music that plays the most in clubs is techno and tech-house, a kind of music that just has never spoken to me. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it just doesn’t connect with me. It sounds very repetitive and very foreign to me. Then, I learned about NAAFI and listened to those records by artists like Siete Catorce, Lechuga and Lao, all that stuff, it blew my mind. And the cool thing is that recently, when Lechuga came to Quito, I got to open for him, and it was amazing. I told him, “Look, this is the best, you changed my mind, you changed my life,” and it was great. I gave him a copy of ‘Caverna’, and he really liked it.
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So what makes this an Ecuadorian album of electronic music? What is its element that makes it stand out, not just as Latin American, but as Ecuadorian?
‘Caverna’ has a lot of rhythmic bases that I draw from local genres, like the albazo, and lots of sounds from drums used in those rhythms, like Bomba del Chota, which is music from northern Ecuador. I sampled the rhythmic pattern of these genres and started manipulating. There are many polyrhythms in Ecuadorian music, the drums I used, and I also like to think that the melodies I make sound melancholic. And it’s like Quito is a super grey city, full of mountains, we can’t even see the horizon, there are only mountains all around, I love it, it’s very beautiful. And I feel like it reflects a bit what it feels like to be here.
You mean the city has influenced your way of making music in this album?
Yes, a lot, at least in the positive aspects. The food here is incredible, I have a lot of tracks named after food dishes. My friends, and people I know here, all of them are incredible people. There are negative aspects: there aren’t many opportunities, at least if you make this kind of electronic music I make, and there aren’t many events for this kind of music. But with several friends and collectives, we managed to organise our own parties and events. Let’s say, the food, the people, my close friends, mainly my family, and the landscape of Quito is amazing. In five hours, I can be at the beach if I want, and if I walk for half an hour, I’m on a mountain. It’s great; wherever you stand, it looks like a postcard photo. It’s very beautiful.
How did you get so interested in Ecuadorian music? Is it from your childhood?
My grandpa loved Ecuadorian music and I’ve inherited a lot of vinyl records from him. And later on, when I went to university, I met all kinds of people. There’s this friend of mine, Jesús Bonilla, who has a famous indigenous music group called Uma Zapa. We used to have conversations, and he would just teach me about Ecuadorian music, and recommend books to me. Thanks to him, I got this drive to learn more about Ecuadorian music. Ecuador lacks memory, archive, so it’s a bit hard to access traditional stuff. There’s a great DJ with a YouTube channel called Musicoteca, and I think he uploads records he has. But unfortunately, we don’t have lots of initiatives like that. On the other hand this is something that brings some magic to music research, that moment when you find a gem.
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Publish date : 2024-09-25 00:21:00
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