México Y2K17 Livelooping Festival - Part 1
Alright, this is gonna be a lenghty post. But I feel like I have to go into detail about the festival I just came back from... it’s worth it. So go get yourself another coffee and sit down. Welcome to sharing one of the best experience of my life as a musician so far!
In fall 2015 I met Lizeth Ruvalcaba and Eliud Ernandes at the annual Livelooping Festival in Santa Cruz. These two form the musical duo CIAN, based in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, and told me about their plan to put up a similar festival in Mexico the coming year, casually inviting me to come and perform. For various reasons, 2016 didn’t end up being a good year for traveling, but I was even more excited when it crystallized that I would be able to attend the second edition in May 2017
To be frank, I had no idea what I was getting into. What scope the festival would have. How it would be to arrive in Mexico, a country about which I hardly knew anything about, other than that it’s the home of Aztecs, Mayas, Inkas and Tequila, and that the last VW Beetle left its Mexican factory in 2003.
However, what Liz and Eliud have created out of their initial vision, went beyond all my keenest hopes and wishes. A well curated and highly professional music festival featuring 26 artists from 6 countries, traveling through 3 cities and playing at rather impressive stages. And besides that, also a unique hub for personal and artistic exchange, but I will get to that later…
Our journey started in Guadalajara, whose smog dome could be spotted miles away from the airplane. A traditional savoury breakfast with Chilaquiles and strong, more or less locally grown coffee fueled my weary body after 21 hours of travel and helped me stay awake until the evening, when whole bunch of people was assembled in a bar called Silvestre. There we were, ready to kick off the festival - not yet musically, but socializing and exchanging names and stories. A bunch of live loopers with the most diverse backgrounds and approaches to music, lots of us strangers, but not for long….
FESTIVAL START IN GUADALAJARA
After a long night of getting to know each other over beers and multi-instrumental courtyard jams, the performances started on a Monday at the Universidad Panamericana, on a chilled indoor stage where most of us would give a first taste of their works. I was fairly impressed with the stage setup, even including lights and live visuals, unaware yet that it was modest compared to what my second and final performance in Guadalajara would hold:
A newly built Culture Center in Zapopan offered us an amazing classical concert hall with a stage big enough so that six of us playing that day could all set up at the same time and then play one after the other without long transition times. The sound unfolded massively in the large theatre space. But these main concerts weren’t even the highlight of our week-long stay in the home-town of tequila...
During the week days, the local School of Rock hosted musical workshops where my old Californian friend Rick Walker would talk and teach us about rhythm and percussion and ambient jazz guitarist James Sidlo from Texas broke down his setup for us and explained the use of effects and tools to create drones and intricate layers of sound. The geeks among us also explored the shop section, browsing for new interesting pedals to add to their boards, and the nights always ended at our headquarter, soon to be called „Loopicasa“, where we drank and chatted and played music together until exhaustion made us stop.
Also, a very special event was set up on Thursday night: four duo performances – each consisting of two randomly paired loopers – were to take place in the Laboratorio Sensoral, an experimental space for arts and sound in the city center. James Sidlo and I would play as the second team, between the groups of Faisal Khan from Pakistan with Oscar Galoz from Mexico, Liz Ruvalbaca from Guadalajara together with Spookstina from North Carolina and Rick Walker from Santa Cruz with the local musician Marks aka. Los Hijos de Doña Loope.
Exciting – to get a chance to trigger one’s experimental side and jam along with another person you’ve barely met, especially as someone who is usually very tied to traditional pre-arranged song structures. I could dwell for hours on this particular event, but will keep it short: Each of our random multinational groups managed to create such an intense and unique sonic journey that by the end of the night we were all so blissfully charged with the magic we had just witnessed, that we exchanged baffled looks and kept nodding to each other:
This is it. This is music, this is why we do this.
As a side note, James and I were so struck by our improvisation that we are planning to collaborate in the future… but let’s not jinx that yet….
After one week in the brisk heat of Guadalajara, a long, but air-conditioned bus ride took half of the artists to the small traditional town of San Miguel Allende. Our stage there was the area around an inactive fountain in the lush and beautiful courtyard of Centro des Artes Ignazio Ramírez.
Despite missing our first bus and arriving horribly late at night, despite hearing from the hostel staff in the evening that there was no running water and we would have to fill and use buckets to even operate the toilets, despite being woken up at 6 in the morning by mysterious cannons saluting for an hour, and despite playing in the open sun at 30°C and struggling with overheating laptops, boiling hot gear surfaces and invisible LEDs on our pedals, it seemed like nothing could even scrape the enthusiasm and good spirit we had already built up over the last couple of days.
We were hungry, hungover, exhausted – and happy!
I had no idea what to expect when I realized that a whole bunch of our performances were set up to be inside the metro stations of Mexico City. Would it be a busking setup? What is the acoustic space like? Would people even care?
But watching the first gig at the city’s actual Metro Museum, where Xandra Wong and Violoncheloops kicked off this little series of events, I was finally convinced and relieved. And finding my own stage (to be shared with ecnegrU) at Chabacano station the next day, located in a large hall between escalators, as well as watching my other friends play in a charming spot at Zapata station that was dark and enclosed like a small club space, and completely transformed by lights and projected visuals, I remained genuinely amazed.
With all in all 8 perfomances per day acros the city, always sets of two in two spaces simultaneously, we hijacked the public transport net and interrupted the hasty routines of many locals who actually came and stayed and allowed themselves to be carried away for a moment before continuing on there way. The events had been titled as Interventions, and that was indeed what they were, technically at highest level, officially presented by the Metro and resonating well with our mostly spontaneous audience.
Later in fact, a good handful of people that attended the main concerts, admitted they had come because they had spotted us on the metro.
The next venue was a completely different story and much more similar to what I am normally used to – a small room in the Satellite City, a bit further outside of CDMX.
In stark contrast to the vast, open spaces of the metro halls, here we had a very cozy, intimate atmosphere and could watch and listen very closely to each other’s sets, drawing a small, probably local crowd of mostly young people. My personal highlight was watching the only performance of CIAN at this festivals, who otherwise were only with us as our omnipresent caring and guiding hosts, now finally showcasing what they normally do and what initially brought us together.
