Rodrigo + Andrés + Diego
a
conversation
with
Andrés
Velasco
Andrés-
I moved to Toronto for this year with my family. I have a bunch of friends here that I’ve got to know through music, and our label, Arts & Crafts is from Toronto, so it was an easy move for us to make for a year.
Giles-
I used to go to Toronto in the early 2000s, I guess. I used to love going there, but boy were the winters cold!
Andrés-
It's gonna be my first January, and honestly, I've never been here in the winter.
This is my first since I started coming here – also in the early 2000s like you.
I connected with all these guys from the local scene, who are now my friends from bands in Toronto like Broken Social Scene, Leslie Feist. It's a great music city and great people.
Giles-
It's nice when you can make a move and there are already people that you know living there. I dunno, it can be a comfort.
Andrés-
Totally. To me, the people are the most important factor for living in a city. And where are you at?
Giles-
I'm in London. I’ve been here since the end of 2008. I was born in the north of England, a bit further north of Manchester and Liverpool.
Andrés-
Wow, it’s been over 10 years since we played the UK. We were there with Albert Hammond Jr and played Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds in the north, and we also went to Liverpool. It’s the only time we've been in the UK to play. It was a lot of fun. We’d love to come back.
Giles-
The economics of touring are so difficult now, right? It feels to me like everyone apart from the big, mainstream acts are being at best squeezed and at worst deliberately excluded from touring.
Andrés-
It's crazy. Yes, we're going to do a bunch of Mexico shows, obviously, next year, and South America is putting their hands up, you know.
Sometimes, it just depends on getting a promoter to do the first one, to be the first one
to, you know, take a risk on you, and then you can build from that.
Giles-
Shows how important your network of connections is, right? And how you manage your relationships with them? I’m sure it’s not the whole thing, but it must help..
Andrés-
Yeah…and getting into festivals is more and more complicated nowadays.
The competition is fierce.
Giles-
I guess differentiation is important in some aspects – you know, like not restricting yourself to particular genres. One of the things that I've liked about Rey Pila is the variety of influences that you bring in - I think that it sets you up better for your future evolution
Andrés-
I think that’s what keeps us engaged, loving the process of what we do and excited about the music. I mean, we listen to all kinds of music. We come from the rock and roll scene, perhaps Alt-rock or indie, if you want to generalise, but I would say we listen to the same amount, or even more, electronic music or even classical.
And we love experimental bands. We are just as passionate about Abba as Nitzer Ebb as Mad Professor. We love all that music and it's a fun process to incorporate it and say, “Okay, let's loop this kind of sound”, you know, dubby, or witch house-y, or just straight up rock and roll and still keep our signature sound is all part of the fun.
Giles-
Does that enjoyment of listening to different styles go back a long way in your life, like to childhood and hearing different music around where you were brought up?
Andrés-
Totally, yeah. I mean, we've all been crazy in love with music since we were in elementary school, you know. I grew up in the 90s, you know, with all that happened in that era. But also, you know, I picked up stuff from the 80s and 70s, all the music that came before. But, you know, starting off with the 90s, I was really into classics from, you know, Depeche Mode and The Cure and all those amazing bands, then a bunch of stuff that was very interesting from Nine Inch Nails to Trip Hop to, like, intelligent electronica, you know, Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin. We had the more mainstream electronica, you know, the Big Beats or whatever, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Prodigy, and obviously grunge.
But I was really into the underground - Pavement, Sonic Youth, Slint, Guided by Voices. So, from the start when we were teenagers, there were all these different influences that we got into.
Giles
I heard all my music on TV or on the radio – mostly radio because TV was quite mainstream – we only had four channels, haha! I mean, the band that really changed my life was when I first heard the Ramones. Probably like quite a few people! When I first heard the opening chords to Judy Is A Punk, that was it. Nothing else was ever the same.
Andrés-
That's an amazing feeling. Oh man…
Giles-
I just played it over and over and over and over. But I was also classically trained. I played the cello from around 8 years old, and I did all my exams and stuff like that. And then I discovered punk rock…
Andrés-
Ah, yeah, with the three chords and 1-2-3-4. Yeah, it was all about the energy and the feelings that it brought up in you. It's so genius.
Giles-
And then I started to open my mind to other stuff outside of punk and hardcore - Sonic Youth, Killing Joke, Jesus and Mary Chain. Public Enemy was a big game changer for me. The raw power of that first album…wow. And then hip hop started crossing over with some of the guitar bands – I think Anthrax and Chuck D doing Bring The Noise or even Sonic Youth and Chuck D with Kool Thing were possibly the ones that opened the gates to more stuff a few years down the line. It felt like my world was starting to open even further. My mind started to open. It's like, okay, this is interesting, there's a lot more stuff out here to kind of play around with.
Andrés-
That first feeling, I would say it's about the same as your first love, or when you first experience being in love. It's almost the same with music. When you have these, like, eureka moments, or whatever you want to call them, when you listen to something and you just cannot stop obsessing about it.
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Giles-
For this album, if I'm not mistaken, there's quite a bit of commentary on things like craving fame, money, social media and things like that. I'm interested to have a conversation about how you see the role of music in society and culture these days.
Andrés-
Well, yeah, I mean, for us as musicians, or if I could even say for you as a writer, it’s a way of life, right? I've always believed that music's role in humanity is so important. I could not imagine the world without it. I think it's almost a basic need for humans. It's like a magic or superpower we have, you know, given how it's integrated in our everyday lives, and what it makes us feel like. We just talked about those moments that you remember the first time you heard something, how it's integrated in our memory, how it brings up all these feelings and memories. That’s just magical. For me, the main driver to make music is to try and make others feel what I have felt before with music, you know, like bring back the memories and feelings I had.
That's like the primary instinct.
Whenever someone comes up to us and tells us how any piece of our music affected their lives, that's the ultimate mission for me - that's the ultimate recognition.
That’s what makes me feel the best, you know, because music is the thing that has changed my life in so many ways. In some ways, being a musician is like me getting in the shoes of my idols, and trying to do the same work they did.
It gives me a sense of purpose.
Giles-
That’s a really good point about sense of purpose. I think that’s what most people are striving for in their lives. I completely agree with you. Music has always done that for me. There's just something so powerful about the whole kind of package - you listen to the music, you have a reaction to it, you listen to the words, sing them, you obsess over the artwork, the photos, the sleevenotes…
Andrés-
Totally, it changes your everyday experience in so many ways. When you talked about, the commentary on the album, I'm not the singer or lyrics writer in the band, but, I think that sense of purpose, or the reason for making music when that is in at the forefront, I think there's a big difference between artists, and that's part of what you mentioned about fame.
Now, are they doing it because of the fame, or are they doing it because of a more artistic meaning or purpose?
And, you know, there's a lot of intertwining in those two worlds.
But I think that purpose sets a lot of artists apart for me. I mean, you would want to take your music to as many ears as possible, get more exposure or attention, or whatever you wanna call it. But I think the main purpose behind it cannot be fame.
I think we kind of see right through other artists that are in it primarily for the fame or just the attention.
That's fine, if that's the way they want to carry on but for us, at least the ones we admire, most are on the other side of the spectrum.
Giles-
Do you think the industry is leaning more towards artists that crave fame and are more willing to be artificial? Do you think it's got worse for that?
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Andrés-
Probably, in the sense that now it's all very much in our faces, like, the numbers are right there. Everyone's got their number right here, like their badge of how popular you are. You know, oh, I see your badge, you're super, super popular. I mean, it's not that it’s their fault. Some obviously are popular, and because they do amazing stuff, you know, it's not that it's a bad thing, per se, but when it's so obvious now and right there in your face, I don't know, lots of people are craving that badge above anything else, you know?
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G-
Yeah, it feels like this idea of trying to do “better” is being defined more and more by materiality and less about “being” better in life, like 'better' is having bigger, brighter things, like material things in life, like a new car, a new house. And when I’ve achieved that, what do I do next? It’s like this idea of the Hungry Ghost. I know this materiality has been around for ages – maybe it’s just more
visible and in your face these days
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A-
Yes, it makes you think about how you measure success in the music business. Is it fame? I mean, it's not something new, but now you bring it up, yeah I think about it. When will I feel we have succeeded, or whatever? When we play our favorite club in our city, or when we're played on the radio? You know, I remember all the small steps we took - we got that gig at our favorite club. Then, “Oh, my God, our music is on the radio, oh my god, we got our first
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record deal, oh my god, we have a physical version of our music”. So you keep climbing all these milestones, yes, but it can never be enough for some, you know: “I have 10,000 followers. But look at that guy, he's got 100,000”. Then when you get to 100,000 “Oh, look at that guy. He's got 10 million”. How do you get to 10 million? “Oh, look at that guy. He's got 100 million”. So, when are you successful? I think about how to measure success, how to be at ease with what you've done and what you've accomplished, and you know, savour it. I
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understand that it can sometimes be hard because you might be doing great, but that might not be enough for a lot of people you know. And then you have some bad days and thoughts like “what else should I be doing?” creep in. Then, I think you need to dial it back to look at all the work that was put into this new album, or look at the comments from the fans, or how you change these lives with your music. It’s hard to, you know, put your feet on the ground and be happy with what you're doing.
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G-
Totally right. I think it's really hard to ignore those voices, because it's just always there. This information is always coming at you in some sort of form. How you respond is the important thing. How to keep yourself grounded. Is it about being comfortable in yourself?
Is it because musicians’ lives are financially precarious when cost of living and wealth gaps are so astronomical and obvious? Does that contribute? How do you yourself do that? And how do you help each other?
A-
Yeah, we help each other. You know, you have your good days and your bad
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days, like on any job. We talk about it a lot, you know, we talk about why we want to keep doing this, be together, and putting all the work and the time and energy, and I'm happy to say that it's still there. It hasn't been easy, and we've been together for over 10 years and I wouldn't say we've reached the maximum level of popularity or whatever, but I'm happy with what we've achieved so far. And we still have a lot of milestones we want to hit, you know,
and things we want to achieve in this and make more music. And some days, one of us might say ”Oh, why are we doing this? Why is it? Is this working or not working, you know?” And in some days, we're like, “Yes, it's working! Look at what we've done. Let’s just take a break. Look back. Take a breather, look back.” I was talking to Diego the other day and we were saying “Hey, we just finished an album, you know, this is our work and look at all the work we put into this.” Releasing music nowadays, it's so weird also, because in the
past, you put the album out, and then you did the videos and the singles, and now, it's so weird because the album comes out on new music Friday, and there it is, it’s out. And some people listen to it but sometimes you feel like the music is forgotten in 24 hours, you know, with the Next Piece Of News that comes along, with all of the 100,000 songs that came out that same day, with new content on Netflix and streaming channels and Twitter and Facebook and the new beef between this and that. And so it's weird and hard to grasp that
moment. But this album has been over three years in the making and I’m really proud of it. We didn't know we were gonna be able to make it, to be honest.We recorded a bunch of this music three years ago. We recorded a bunch of it some months ago but we keep saying to ourselves, look at all the work we put into this, all the discussions we had, and then how we put it together and make it make sense for us, you know, to be an album. So, coming back to what Diego and I were saying – we sat down and said “Hey, we made an album, man, that's amazing, you know, let's see where that takes us. It might get forgotten but some people will love it and will take it for the rest of their lives, or it'll open some doors here and let's see what doors are opened”.
G-
I think this record is perhaps more electronic than some of the others.
Even with your willingness to experiment with musical styles, does that take you out of your comfort zone?
And do you ever worry about what people will think about it?
A-
Some years back, we were more worried about that. I think nowadays, if we like it, and we think it’s good, that’s all we need. And we'll see where that takes us.
I think we're at a good point where we've been bringing in all these different influences.
I've been talking to Diego, and I think we could do an album of just instrumental electronic music.
We could do an album just like that and could release it easily. I think we're at a point where we can take all these different roads and I think it will be fine.
Obviously, you sometimes get those comments of people, like “Oh, I liked it better when they were more rock and roll and less electronic “or “it was less pop” or, and that's fine, you know, you don't have to always like what we do, we've seen that over the years.
Also we have, a really good group of die hard fans that have gone with us through all these different wormholes.
And so it's cool that they're open to listening to different stuff.
We brought back Spanish language in this new album too, which was something we hadn't done in years.
It was fun getting that back into the equation.
G-
I think that's a great thing to do.
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A-
It’s weird and I don't know what you think about this, but we in Mexico grew up listening to rock and roll and alternative music, which was 98/99% sung in English.
That's the way we heard music in Mexico you know.
In England, or maybe even the US, it's how you hear your popular music all the time and it’s first nature.
In Mexico, that's not the popular music.
We have, you know, regional Mexican music and other genres that are more homegrown and localized.
Rock and roll is homegrown for you, you know?
For us, when we grew up listening to rock and roll, songs in English were the way we heard it.
I have an American family background, as does Rodrigo, so the English comes easy for us in that sense.
I don't know if this is the general experience for other Mexican bands, but for us, it always came so easy to write in English. It's just a language game with the sound. So that's the way we experienced it, but then Diego had written some music in Spanish.
I had done some in Spanish too.
But we all, for years, had this idea where we thought it would be kind of weird to mix them up in the same album.
And then when we had these songs, and Diego had written some of them in Spanish, we put them together and they sounded good being mixed together. For some reason it just worked, you know?
So now, we can write in both languages, and it's also fun to see the reactions to that idea.
G-
I wonder if we get to a stage in our lives where we are willing to take some risks and experiment. And in your case, I dunno, perhaps explore your culture through expression of language, see how the language relates to the music that you've grown up with.
In any case, it’s interesting to have this out there now.
A-
Yeah, I don't know what your experience, for example, would be, as a native English speaker, to listen to music in Spanish, I don't know. But, I think it's fun to see.
G-
Well, for me, I'm really interested in language and how it’s used to represent a feeling or convey a message or whatever, and also how it’s not used – for example how do you convey a message or feeling with instrumentals, without lyrics? There's a great band that I love who are solely instrumental apart from one or two spoken word pieces. They're called Divide and Dissolve and the music is brutally heavy. There’s Takiaya who plays guitar and she juxtaposes this with her beautiful soprano sax which cuts through the density like a knife. Together with the cavernous drums, it’s just a huge, huge sound.
They are active about colonialism, white supremacy, reclaiming indigenous and ancestral land, nature, those kind of themes.
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It’s mindblowing to me how those themes are so viscerally and powerfully present when there are no words.
This really interests me.
Also to answer your question, I’m interested in how I can connect with lyrics sung or spoken in a language that I may not fully or entirely understand.
A-
I’m gonna check out Divide and Dissolve – thanks for that. Yeah, singing in the Spanish language was a good breakthrough for us.
G-
I guess we touched on this earlier, but when you do something different like you’ve done with language, there’s always a risk that some fans
might not like it, so this brings up the age-old question of who are you creating your music for – yourselves or your fans?
A-
I've always thought there has to be a balance between both, you know, and maybe when you are a band, you have to first be happy with what you're doing, and feel really engaged with it yourself and then see how it translates towards the fans.
G-
It's like you're also three individuals who have your own lives, your own evolution, and then you have the life of the band as well with its own evolution. Those are difficult dynamics to keep on track where you’re all aligned. Maybe evolution together is just intuitive. I dunno, maybe I just over-theorize these things, but I’m just fascinated how people come together and stay together in such a complex and fast-changing world
A-
Well, yes, you’re right. We’ve got our own lives and different circumstances and the three of us have gone through our moments…
like for this album we took a pause.
And I didn't know if we would have a new album when the pandemic started.
Everyone kind of went their own way, but I feel that that space we gave, that pause we took, was so positive in hindsight.
I think we needed that.
Everyone was making peace with different things in their lives.
It definitely gave us all perspective, and I hope a lot of us learned and got better from it, you know, because then suddenly the world got back to normal - whatever normal is - but I think about those years a lot and try to go back to some of the things that gave me perspective.
We released our last album (Velox Veritas) during the pandemic, and it was so weird. We talked about releasing music now being kind of weird with all the attention economy, but in the pandemic, it was even weirder. I mean, we had big plans. We had some shows too… we were touring with The Strokes with that album, and all touring obviously just evaporated. It was so weird and disappointing, and then we didn't know how the music industry was going to bounce back, or what was going to be the new ecosystem, how it was going to work, will we still play shows, will we still tour. But this time around, after over 10 years of being in Rey Pila, I feel as excited as I did when I started in some sense.
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It’s a really good feeling.
G-
What was it like when you first got back together in the rehearsal room or wherever during the breaks in the pandemic?
A-
I got a call from Diego, around Christmas a couple of years ago, and he was saying, “Hey, man, how you been? Listen, it's gonna be my birthday in January, and I don't know, I have this feeling that it'd be cool to get back together and play a gig on my birthday, see how that feels” our conversation was that kind of vibe. So I was like “yeah, that sounds good, you know, let's see if we still remember the songs!”
There's always this feeling of dread that, “Oh, how did we play? You know, like, I gotta remember our songs”. We’ve never played some of them live, we’d only them played in the studio, you know. So, it was pretty natural in that sense. We booked the show in a cool venue in Mexico City called Foro Alicia, which is a kinda punk club but has now sadly closed – it was our CBGB. It was such an energetic show. And with that show, it just all came back.
G-
That’s really incredible. That must have been such a reassuring, beautiful feeling to come together like that.
A-
Oh yeah, for sure…and all these weird feelings disappeared, and it felt like “ok we're back on a mission”.
G-
So, looking to the future, what’s exciting you?
A-
Well, making more new music always excited me, especially now.
The other day, I was with Diego in his home studio going through some of our ideas, loops or whatever. The more we explore all these new influences, I can still feel that excitement. I want to get into this music. And obviously, taking this album to the live realm and playing all these shows that we have planned for next year and seeing how that comes through - that definitely excites me too. So I'm looking forward to those.
Maybe we'll be doing part two of this album.. I don't know if this album is gonna stay a part one, but there's definitely a bunch of music in the back seat for part two. I don't know how that's gonna turn out, but recording new music and playing live shows definitely excites me. We got all these shows lining up, hopefully playing new countries, you know. Maybe going back to the UK. I've always had this dream of playing Japan. I’ve never been to play there. So it might be a bit of a far-fetched dream, but, you know, these things kind of happen. We definitely feel a kinship with Europe. We've only played UK, Paris and Amsterdam, 10 years ago with Albert Hammond Jr on a small tour. We've toured the US a bunch of times, and it's great, and it's big, and there are so many places to go but there's something about Europe, we've always felt super connected there, and each country is so different from each other.
There are so many things on our bucket list and that keeps us excited.
It's the best job in the world.
