I think you have to take into account the speed at which everything evolved. When I first started making music, I was an architecture student, and I was at home recording with a PlayStation microphone, mixing stuff on GarageBand, and that’s it. I only had six songs at the time, which I uploaded to Spotify. Four months later, I was already touring, and did that for about a year and a half. But then, I couldn’t really find a point to what I was doing.
Coming into the recording process, I think people expected me to do a traditional record, super folksy. But I didn’t necessarily want that. I wanted it to be very well produced and have the feel of a Frank Ocean or Blood Orange record. [Refree] came in and reworked a lot of songs in a much more experimental, more intimate, and ethereal way, which was definitely a departure from what I had originally done, and I was a bit reserved about it at first.
I originally imagined a very traditional record, based on two central elements: the guitar and my voice. But Raul came to the studio with very different ideas. We spent a lot of time thinking about all the songs and figuring out how to dress them. Some were songs that were already fully formed and others that emerged from the process. I think we’ve gotten to a point now where we have made a super good team and I completely trust his vision. draws from lots of sounds, themes, and moods.
To me, each song is its own little universe. Each one belongs to a specific place and is influenced by specific geographies. But I do believe that they all exist under the, a type of sonic journey that spans both sides of the Atlantic, from the Iberian peninsula to the coasts of Latin America. For example, “La Filipina,” sounds a bit like a.
But there is also “la cantera” as a term itself, which influenced the larger aesthetic of the album. There’s “la cantera” as it refers to the youth and then there is “la cantera” as it refers to the physical place where one extracts minerals. And I wanted to represent both of these meanings in the songs. I wanted them to sound metallic, futuristic, and almost robotic. For instance, “Caballito” is a rumba, but a kind of cyborg rumba.