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Part 2

Could you take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work? Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

I have a fixed schedule but I never respect it. Don´t get me wrong, I love making "To do´s lists" but sometimes 24 hours is not enough.
Right now I´m kind of on vacation, but in my life I always blend my work with the music, because my career as an advertiser is also a tool for creating and trying to get my music to my audience. So I´m kind of "a musician that knows how to promote his band because he is also an advertiser".

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that's particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?

The creative process is a very hard thing to describe. Right now I´m trying to develop a manual for creativity in advertising and it´s like trying to describe the map of a brain.

But let´s grab "Leading to nowhere", the 6th track of the album. I was in Perú walking my way home from work, 40 minutes by foot always open my mind for thinking and feeling. It was night and I was going through a lots of parks on my way so inspiration came for the intro, cause I was kind of in a dark environment and needed a dark song.

Then I came home and I wrote down the score (in the computer). I didn´t do anything more for that song in a couple of months, then traveled to Croatia and went to the woods with my guitar. Now that I say it, I think I went to the woods because I needed to feel in a similar space than when I wrote the intro. A couple of Ideas came in, and in the following days I finished the work at home, with a lot of hard work more than inspiration.

When I went back to Perú and my producer (Adolfo) listened to the song, he liked it very much, added some arrangements and it was ready to be recorded.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

Wow, I´ve been working 7 years in creativity and 10 trying to write some music, and still haven´t found an answer for this. Just, don´t press yourself too much, because if you keep worrying about being blocked, you will stay blocked. Work hard thinking and playing and rest from time to time.
Making 8000 push ups in a row won't make you stronger immediately, and trying to have non-stop creative thinking for 15 hours, won´t make you create a masterpiece. Sometimes people confuse breaks with distractions.

How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected? What do you achieve and draw from each experience personally? How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?

When I think about writing an album, before the music and live experience, there is a CONCEPT. If you have a clear idea of what you want to tell, then the music and the live experience will fit perfectly, because they are expressions of the same primal thing.

How do you see the relationship between the 'sound' aspects of music and the 'composition' aspects? How do you work with sound and timbre to meet certain production ideas and in which way can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?

I think the more obvious example will be with Peruvian instruments for Ancestral Dawn. But I really don´t have a precise answer to this question. Sometimes you know that timbre  will take compositional qualities, some times it remains as arrangement. It really depends on the song, the inspiration and certain objectives.
I think the best example for timbre becoming fundamental to a song in modern music is POP.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work? What happens to sound at its outermost borders?

Difficult question. I think for musicians it works a little upside down. We make music from our experience with the other senses, but our audience creates their own experience with our music.

I really don´t know what does exactly happens with the senses overlaps, but one thing that I know is that everything is at some point connected, and that´s when inspiration and feelings appear.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I write songs for personal redemption and also for showing the world new possibilities with ancient instruments, as the Peruvian instruments. I also feel the necessity of exploring new styles of music that have to do with getting back to my roots. My grandfather was Croatian, my grandmother Peruvian, my other grandfather was English and my other grandmother, Spanish. So I feel the need to explore my roots through music. So if you hear some weird stuff in the next album with different styles from all over the world, keep in mind what I just wrote.

But also, there is this second part with a commercial approach. The music industry is THAT, an industry. And if we want to live from it, we need to have in mind to whom are we gonna communicate with our music.

It is remarkable, in a way, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact. Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?

There are many basic concepts of music, at least a couple that come to my mind.

You can be very structural and say that music is a logical pattern of sounds (rhythm/melody and harmony) that make sense together, or you can say that music is the non verbal language of sounds.

Still, I think people are approaching more the second concept, which is also more abstract. To be honest, I don´t have any clue of how music will evolve in the next century. Electro is taking things through a different path and I don´t really know what the future is.


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