Occupation: musician/producer
Nationality: Mexican
Current Release: Raixes on Extra Soul Perception and Worldwide Records
Recommendations: Just Kids by Patti Smith / La Enfermedad del Siglo by Silvana Estrada

If you enjoyed this interview by Tuzeint, visit his bandcamp page to listen to the album.

When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I’ve been into music, since I was a kid, it became my sacred place where I could discover myself through different stages of my life by these pure mirrors which are creation and music.

I started with different instruments (drums, guitar, piano), bands, songs and my voice quest through imitation, then at 17 I started to learn and get my first real glimpse into production. At 23 I came back from living in Shanghai for a year and started my real journey with music, the first real seeds of my first EP. Then, since the pandemic I’ve been 2 years in this quest. It’s my first body of work and the first one in Spanish, my mother tongue where I've found my voice and myself through this musicality and pure expression.

I was always heavily attracted to African soul music. My dad was a singer and I always listened to new music around the house, mostly white music which I didn’t vibe with too much.

These last 3 years of my life I've been into Latin music like Cuban, Mexican, flamenco, Brazil, and also from Africa. Understanding, appreciating my roots and discovering myself through it. The music resonates this place of rebirth and transformation.

What drew me in I guess it was the energy of creation, transformation and beauty, discovering myself through it, feeling something bigger than me, it’s always been a spiritual connection with music, like a pure mirror.

Some people experience intense emotion when listening to music, others see colours or shapes. What is your own listening experience like and how does it influence your approach to music?

When I listen to music it resonates with my spirit, I feel strong emotions and magnetic pulls & winds to create. It’s a collective source of living frequencies which allows me to unify with the world, discover and resonate myself through it, it’s sacred and beautiful.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I feel I’ve come a long way to get home, I started with what was available in my surroundings, family and friends, I passed through many genres and styles, imitating artists I love, there was a point I noticed soul music was my place and started to move that direction and the question of who am I raised loudly and made me search through my spirit, music and voice,

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I feel that separateness is an illusion, something bigger than me which I am part of and music is a language which resonates this truth and has been a great mirror and constant transformation of who I am as an artist.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

When you approach a work of art, the question you’re answering is who you are. As you offer and serve your self to the music, it will serve you. Every day is a new opportunity to create the most beautiful thing that makes you feel alive.

Each new born song has to make you fall in love harder than the last one.

Music is spiritual. The work of art is defined by the way you live and breathe your life. Choose to have a sacred conversation.

Imitate, observe, listen, share, give, receive, try, become.

Most important thing is how it makes you feel. Songs show themselves and guide you through them by living them.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

In a way, I think music reflects the frequency of the times living by the creators. And music reveals who you are as a spirit. So, originality must be this pure expression of the self from which music mirrors and shines this light which continues to touch the present that it has always been through music.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Guitar and piano, it’s mainly collecting beautiful chords I resonate with that make me feel and play & create. Tuning myself as a channel of something bigger than me.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

I usually start the day at night. I stay up mostly all night to make music at my studio in my house in Mexico then I get up at 9am,I go to the mountain near my house for a 30 min hike and meditation after that I work for about 3 hours on my personal business. Then after lunch I go for a coffee and listen to the music and go back to the studio to continue to work on it or create something new.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

My creative process is intuitive, I just feel a need to create and roam places to find that thing which needs to come out to the world and I just channel it through.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I am mostly solitary when I create, I feel the need of space and silence to resonate and delve into myself through creation, songs show themselves and guide you through it by feeling and living them.

Lately I've started to collaborate and be open to musicians which has led me to beautiful places where I couldn’t have arrived at alone.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

We are all different faces of the same thing, by this I mean my work and creativity is not related to the world, it is the world, being here it’s not a casual and ordinary thing, it’s a participatory universe and this is my slice.
I don't know if music has a role on society, I believe it’s a primal language to communicate what we cannot put into words or reason, it’s that abstract conversation we have with the divine while being alive. It proves to us and gives us confidence that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. But I would say a role may be to get in tune with universal energy.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Since I was little, I used to get back from school and go to the bathroom for the best acoustic sound and let it all out, it was a way for me to deal, understand and honor being alive.

Every night for years I used to choose a CD for the night and dreamed that I was playing that music on a big stadium.

Death and loss have been a beautiful blessing, an eye-opener while being alive and music has been the conductor for this energy to be liberated into something more transcendental than the physical realm.

I also cry sometimes when I hear some great artists dies and hear his/her music, it touches my spirit, because we are all one at the beginning and the end.

When my father died I had fear of listening and feeling music.Then there was this first album of Tom Misch that had just come out and I listened to only that for two months. It finally opened me to listen again and be brave to feel. And mostly to make my journey as an artist in this life.

There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Music is a divine and primal expression of the universe and science is a human expression for understanding the divine, which all is :)

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I believe the act may be different but the source, intention and presence is the same when you create. We have been gifted as creators, something can come to physical from the mental, either a cup of coffee or a song or sculpture, I wouldn’t limit creativity to only art, on the contrary I’d say your very life in all of its expressions is creation.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I sense that more than our ears, our spirit and energy is the one who connects with vibrations/sound, also, being 70% water we must be vibrant little rivers.