It was through Joan Bibiloni that I got acquainted with the scene on the island of Mallorca at the end of the 70s, especially on the Deiá and Llucalcari coasts. One fine day Joan proposed that we go to the studio and record an LP. Over a few days I set to work gathering together material and a good part of the musicians I have worked with ever since. What a great scene that was!… Returning to Madrid the next year, Silvia Lobosevic -who had booked some concerts for me- put me in the studio again. With the help of my brother, Jesús, and the rest of the band -Carlos Carli, Rubem Dantas, Tarik, Manuel Toro and Carles Benavent -we recorded an album and called it "El canto de los guerreros"… Really, we were prepared for what happened.

Camarón, Enrique Morente and other flamenco artists -in particular Paco de Lucía- became regulars and, perhaps without them realizing it, teachers… All of them certainly taught me how to go "A mi aire" (in my own style)… a style that involved them all and on which they all left their mark. In the year I recorded this album, I had some Sinclair computers and, with a bit of patience, I succeeded in programming my first sequence for "two spaced out dudes and a flamenco on the loose"…

It was the first thing I did for Nuevos Medios, and Mario put me up when my future was uncertain, as uncertain as the title of my next work… "Las cigarras son quizá sordas" (Perhaps cicadas are deaf). What a mysterious poem! All of the wisdom of the desert transformed into art. It was my brother Jesús who showed me those poems. In the process of creation or gestation of a project, at random times there intervene different little processes that determine the character of the work. I am delighted that it happens this way and perhaps this is why I stumbled upon the poem at just the right time, when the music was already finished. When two or more artists get together it generates a magic that is difficult to define or cause, neither character nor age nor origin seems to be sufficient arguments to see the face of the child.

Not even the relationship that existed between us all could have predicted the course of "Veloz hacia su sino" a ship that seemed to know its destiny independent of its occupants. The recording was difficult to direct -hundreds of different ideas perhaps for many other records- but the tape was complete and time was up. Sometimes losing your mind is the way to see and hear things more clearly. It makes the complex simple!

When Tomás San Miguel returned from San Francisco, he came with a big binder full of songs under his arm and I practically had to fight him to get him to open it. Well, he opened it up and what came out of it was … "Vida en catedrales" Across Spain there are many historic sites, some in ruins and others beautifully restored, where playing without any sort of amplification is an experience that grabs you. It was how we gave life to those places, and life was what they gave back to us.

Recording with Chano Domínguez on his first album, I took up again an idea that had been bouncing around in my head for some year: to play the music of Paco de Lucía without guitar and with musicians who understood it, playing it in a different way. I proposed the idea to him and we began working on "10 de Paco" I went down to Puerto de Sta. María where Chano lives and, already in rehearsals, the music began to give off a special aroma (of shrimp from the bay, in particular). In the studio with Tino di Geraldo and Javier Colina, it was a genuine surprise to hear how it sounded… new, unclassifiable, yet familiar. Chonchi Heredia was simply brilliant. You could say that I've known Tomás since be began playing, I've always considered him a great artist and he has always been a source of inspiration.

Tomás San Miguel y Jorge Pardo
"De dos en dos"

In our search for sites and settings to create our music, we stumbled across Casa Piña. A South African architect in his passage through Mojacar had left behind this marvel. Little by little and "De dos en dos" (Two by two) we cooked up this project. The best thing probably was the time we spent on the porch listening to music and looking at the moon reflected on the sea during those already mild February nights. What music would sound bad in a setting like that? It was the last record that La Barbería did for Nuevos Medios. I had just recorded "10 de Paco" with Chano, and Carles' hand had recovered from the accident a year before. Negri and el Paquete pitched the project to us and, setting to work, something was created, just like that.

With the passage of time a return to a more intimate way of working was logical and in this way "2332" was created. I recorded hours of improvisation over samples in a serious record produced by my brother Jesús and my colleague Fernando Bravo. Without a doubt, the best part of it was the setting, a beautiful house on the coast of Mojácar. The hard work came later, when I picked out the phrases that interested me, gave them the form of compositions and redid the harmonies, orchestrating and sequencing them. I moved things around so much, from one place to another, that I finally decided to suggest that the listener use the random play mode of the CD player with the intention of returning the phrases to their original place. In the meantime, I saw that all of the rhythms that I was working with, wherever they were coming from, had 2-3 or 3-2 as cycles of accents: whether they were binaries or ternaries, like the bulería, Cuban clave, many African rhythm cycles, Cajun music, and including the bossa nova, and certainly many more that I'm unaware of. How strange, so distant yet so familiar! (When I looked at the palms of my own hands, I saw that each one has five finger, which were symmetrical and which can be divided by their function into 2-3 3-2… and so many polyrhythms that arise from 2 and 3.

I then spent more than a year on tour with Tino and Carles before we finally decided to record "El concierto de Sevilla" (The Seville Concert) What a delight to be able to play with such people without struggles or other craziness: music plain and simple, with no esthetic compromises. Tremendously flamenco music, for whoever wished to experience it, spontaneous and vehement. It would have been safer…

¡Mira!: this one is too new so I don't have any perspective on it yet, and so can't say anything about it. It has been a complex recording and not free from a few problems--changes in studio, in systems, in supports, engineers, timetables…etc. But it also features a bunch of incredible artists doing their thing. It is thanks to luck, and Musiquita, that this musical Tower of Babel can be appreciated. Enjoy!