I joined the ibiza folk group when I was 9-10 years old more-less. Not by some kind of academic/knowledge motivations; there was a folk party going on in an old country house, and immediately I knew I wanted to join the group. The folk parties, the rehearsals, the dances, the trips,.. were so fun. I look to how we behaved and we had definitely a folk attitude. 

We the youngest ones were naughty in a good way; screaming, singing and clapping around Spanish cities, airports,.. throwing pillows out of the school windows we slept in, putting bunk beds down and pissing off any authoritarian figure that wanted to establish some kind of leadership upon us. 

Folk festivals had some influence upon me. We were touring around Spanish areas, (Valencia, Basque country, a Malaga village, Mallorca, Galicia,..) I saw other folk groups perform and that had a positive influence on me. Watching the Galician ladies with the tambourines, the hosting folk group that made us tours around their area, getting to know the girls from the area,.. Folk is not dead nor it is a performed tradition. We were communicating real things while dancing, we had real fun while playing the instruments, fucking up the rhythm and laughing our asses off from the beginning to the end.

When I was playing at the local Ibiza symphonic band I started improvising over it. The percussion section was total fun between friends, either playing or not. No matter what the band played, I always added something to the music, which was never too much and never too little, just what was needed to surpass the robotic-ness of the percussion scores, to bring the music to life. The directors never cared about it, either it was good so they didn’t care about it or the improvisation was so in place that they didn’t notice it. We were even communicating between us when improvising, a lot of new noises and motifs came up while doing it. We were creating atmospheras just by doing that, like some kind of mysterious wooden claves as in a spooky amazonic jungle. It was like real-time movie scoring and that definitely started me and trained me into good-taste improvising, developing a good ear, in group improvisation,.. we did that two days a week (rehearsals) and one concert a month, since i was 14 years old until now. 

Since little I was listening to Santana in my father’s car, apart from similar artists. I had the idea to form a group, play music, have fun, but I didn’t know what could i play. At the time I was playing percussion (drums, hand drums, classical percussion) and I played vibraphone/marimba at the music school’s youth jazz combo, but I didn’t know any mallet player musician or music, I didn’t know it was a thing, so I didn’t research about it, also, no one showed me any mallet music apart from the classical repertoire. 

So I was looking what to play. Drums, hand drums? Well, I wanted to do something with the music, the harmonies, melodies,.. then, i was looking up Roy Ayers discography and discovered that he was a vibraphone player, and his very first albums were in the west coast cool jazz style. When roy entered the solo I discovered a whole new world, I didn’t know you could do that with a vibraphone, and immediately i knew the mallets were the instrument I wanted to play for the music I wanted to do. 

Then came some time of researching, practicing a bit, not too serious, as I was ending high school, entering university,.. anyways, this part of the story is just historical bullshit.

The first time I played with Joachim Kühn, I had never played free before. Obviously I had some time practicing free alone at home, but not with someone. The first recording with drums was already burning because of the ear I had developed along time. The second recording with the vibraphone and marimba was even more burning. Then he motivated me to compose personal shit. I composed easy bullshit before, very superficial things nothing personal. From long time ago I wanted to do something with the music and the folklore, as I knew both. A lot of musicians from Ibiza wanted to do something like that, probably by some kind of psyche-social conditioning/responsibility to the local culture, but they didn’t know or live the folk, I was the one that could do that, no other folk guy did music seriously and no other music guy did folk seriously. 

When I started composing those things, the melodies, the harmonies, the rhythms, seemed to be familiar. It was all coming from the folk, from a primigeneous universal music that was preserved by the natural frontiers of the island. It was like unveiling something that was there all the time. Therefore, the music of my project is authentic and felt authentic by the people; it is not forced, it is coming from the inside, it is already folk and vanguardist.

I told Joachim: I will create a new kind of music that reflects the mediterranean (lifestyle, folk life, landscapes,..). when you google mediterranean music these kind of italian guitar easygoing pieces appear, or lebanese darbuka fusion people appear. That is obviously not my experience of the mediterranean, so what I was to compose was my vision of it. 

Now, I’m finding new correlations between Ibiza folk and folk from other parts of the world, it is even magical. The Ibiza castanets and drums do the same rhythm as the Gnawa karkabou from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as discovered by Majid and me. The harmonies and melodies from the Ibiza folklore and Celtic/Caucasian/Continental Europe/Bela Bartok harmonies are very similar, apart from the orientalismus that Bartok/Romanian folk have. I discovered everything that rang a bell on me was connected. There was no room for mental conditioning to like the things: first I liked them, then I discovered what were they and how they were related to the Ibiza folk.

I’m happy to have formed my current band. Every member is a pillar that gives sense to the music we’re doing. Majid playing the guembri comes from North-African music and Gnawa folklore, which adds to the music this trance-dance element. Mateusz is the next pillar for Continental-Europe folklore from Poland, Romania, Hungary,.. and he is a tremendous violinist. Both musics are related to the Ibiza folklore, of which I’m coming from. And Ramón is a beast on the drums, he is the definition of vanguardism-folk fusion. 

For me, vanguardism+folk music is the key to make people open, free them from the known, and put them into the unknown, but that is not my main job, people usually tend to discover this by themselves, or either, they don’t discover it really. I’m just a regular guy, not a guru or spiritual leader that tells people what to do, I’m just a regular guy that makes things as he wants to, because I wouldn’t want to make them in any other way, so if vanguardism is what I do, I do vanguardism. I don’t want to play things that are the perpetuation or may perpetuate society’s standards.

The combination of both folk and vanguardism is what folk music really is. The anarchist-like music group where the members respects other’s ideas, and play around them, where you can hop in, tell your ideas with respect to the other. Barely no chieftain establishing a certain pattern, a certain type of groove. Groove should change according to the people’s feelings and inner electricity. In folk+vanguardism you can get to the unknown while being in union with the people. That’s where discovery happens, and that’s the perfect form of civilization, because you can discover things (as new rhythms, new sounds, new textures,..) by yourself, but in union with other people in a free and respectful environment, that is what civilization should be.