I’ve been trying to write a post as I embark in this project of making new music for the next album. An image keeps popping in my head but more like a blurry dream than a memory (which is what it actually is). As the end of the year is coming, I went over some files and photos taken back in the first days of January and there it is. The great orange taking a bath in front of millions of people while it bleeds. It’s almost a horror scene. Tourists from other countries, tourists who are not tourists but try to behave like them and then the ones that have nothing better to do. They are just walkers. Walkers who walk, and sometimes they walk giving their back to the sun. The scene then is complete. It’s like if the photo was trying to reveal itself. Like when a painter paints and the painting reveal itself, he just has to let the characters step forward, towards the artist. The painter’s got let them walk. Sometimes as a drip, a shadow, a gesture. I put a tune by Aaron Parks that I like very much with the purpose of analyze it and learn. The goal was to view it from a structural, melodic, rhythmic and harmonic perspective. Yeah it has the form of a pop song with a bridge before the solo and all that. But the main melody is very singable, it stars on the tonic of the first chord, goes to the third and lands on the tonic of the final chord. Aaron Parks uses only three chords by the way. A refreshing catchy tune still containing that bitter sweet melancholy for only four instruments.

Then I remembered I’ve been working on a piece of about thirty tracks and with a concept that deviated quite significantly from the original idea. It Started as a rhythmic pattern evoking crabs in the beach in the morning and the whole thing turned into an attempt to be the sound equivalent to a dawn in Lima. Yeah, Lima, Peru, South American continent, Planet earth, Milky way. Therefore the title “At Dawn”- or the crabs song.

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I wrote something (in Spanish of course). Just felt it was the right time, after listening to an arrangement for guitar voice and cajon of a poem from modernist Peruvian poet Arturo Corcuera interpreted by Susana Baca. Never knew of the poem but I did know about the modernist movement of the beginning of twentieth century and I have always been interested in the composers and artists in general from that particular era. Including, the impressionism, dadaism, expressionism, etc. Although it was confusing to really know what the difference was between them. I wrote a poem. And I think is not bad. I used to write way more in the past. I do short stories, but poetry is not that common. Remember an image kept popping in my head? The walkers who turn their back to the sunset. The poem is about that. Actually is about a painter who by trying to paint this scene makes very imprecise lines with his brush and the new shapes become these characters. The walkers, those who guide you from the other side. I will convert it into a song and ask a new singer friend I met not too long ago (at a jam session) if she can sing it for the album. It’s going to be fusion of Lo-Fi HipHop and Peruvian Folk, because why not? Yesterday I bought an acoustic guitar. No, I am not a great guitar player.  We are still again in the beginning of a century and to keep the modernist spirit doesn’t do any harm.

Thank you Aaron Parks, thank you Mr. Corcuera, thank you crabs in the beach. Thank you Lo-Fi HipHop producer in the background. You are walking me.