“Tick-tock, tick-tock.” There is no sound as harmless and at the same time as fearsome as that of the passage of time, a sound that marks a microscopic period in the universe but that brings us closer to the end – of life, of love, of everything – a little bit closer, a little more. So, tick-tock, tick-tock, that’s how it starts ‘Far from more’the first collaborative song between Pablopablo, stage name of Pablo Drexler -son of Jorge Drexler with his first partner Ana Laan- and Black Ice Creamstage name of Roberto Carlos Lange, an American musician of Ecuadorian descent who is highly respected on the international independent circuit.
They met in Paris, after finishing their respective concerts at the Pitchfork Festival, and their mutual admiration made the connection immediate. «I am a big fan of his music, it has something cyclical or meditative that I love. Even their most energetic songs seem to move in a kind of minimalist loop that guides you towards emotion. But what I like most is his voice, which sounds like it belongs to another era that you can’t quite locate. So when he contacted me shortly after to do something, I was very flattered,” explains Drexler junior.
«We met in a studio in Eagle Rock, in Los Angeles. After improvising for a while, this song began to appear that talks about how difficult it can be to stay in another person’s life when there is distance between them. We really came to the studio with the sole objective of having a good time and, with some luck, taking away an idea to continue working remotely. The fact that such a beautiful song came out in one afternoon caught us completely by surprise. The incredible thing is that, no matter how much you love someone’s work, there is never a guarantee that when you get together to work one afternoon something will come out of it, however in this case we were very lucky, I feel that every idea we brought was improved in hands of the other. I wish it were always like this!
Helado Negro was left with the same body, for whom recording this song “didn’t require much effort,” he says. «We started with Pablo on the drums and me on the piano, we improvised a little and the seeds of that moment of creation spread throughout the day until we found this song. Little by little the composition developed. Pablo started the melodies and I made the answers to those melodies until all the pieces were made. He has a very different way of composing sounds and His voice always appears like an incandescent melody, burning the songs. And those are the moments you want to have when you collaborate with someone. When music appears, it takes you and transforms you. “Yes, I sat on the drums and Roberto on the piano and we started improvising,” Drexler agrees. «The piano chords that constituted the main idea occurred to him almost immediately. And shortly after, with the guitar recorded, we began to improvise melodies. I think the idea of being ‘Far from More’ came to me because in that Californian studio, I was literally a little too far from home.
The alliance between these two potential geniuses comes in a context of an overabundance of ‘featurings’ that are always sold with slogans of “natural and organic collaboration”, masking a reality that has more to do with positioning and algorithms than with purely motivations. artistic. «That is not new in the world of music. What yes The way of selling and promoting collaborations has changed a lot.in order to have a minimum chance of being heard,” Helado Negro says. “Nowadays, choosing them well is an art that has its merit,” says Pablopablo, who likes to claim the mystique that is built on them “because it is exciting when another person’s voice appears on a record and generates an image of brotherhood and secret complicity between the two artists.
For Pablo Pablo, who is not at all suffering from being a “son of” (“I have a wonderful relationship with my father precisely because we keep it very close to the inside,” he says), this experience has made him believe “even more in the the magic of getting together with other people to write”, especially in the Spanish-speaking field. «I am quite excited about the moment that Spanish is experiencing in global music. If as teenagers they had told us that in a few years we would be making a living making weird music in Spanish, we wouldn’t have believed it. We are taking advantage of that pull very well. We live in a post-Rosalía and C. Tangana world in which there is a very strong interest and daring when it comes to experimenting, taking risks, mixing genres, etc.
But there is one thing that this daring twenty-something is somewhat “afraid” of: How quickly Artificial Intelligence can evolve in the field of music creation and/or falsification or even collaborations. “It makes me think of when you re-watch Pixar’s early 3D animations, like ‘Toy Story’ and you think ‘wow, that looked that bad?’, because nowadays you’re used to much higher image quality. I think that in ten years AI will be so powerful and will generate images and sounds so real that we will revisit what it did today and we will see that what seemed realistic to us was only like a first sketch.
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