The spiritual journey of Vicente García

It’s not the first time Vincent Garcia focuses on indigenous sounds, he had already explored the instruments of his native Dominican Republic such as the priprí, balsié or the palo echao, characteristic of the southern communities, and had incorporated them into his bachatas and merengues.

After the success of his album Candela, which received an Anglo Grammy nomination in 2019, he had the idea of ​​making more music that exalted his roots and gave it an electronic and party flavor: no one better than the British producer Richard Blair to achieve that ideal. But Sidestepper’s famous founder back in the early 2000s was literally on a different beat.

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The person responsible for the expansion of electronic cumbia around the world and for the fusions of folklore with the beats walked along more spiritual paths, in which music fulfills more of a healing task and of connecting with nature than entertaining. That was shortly before the pandemic started.

“I was looking for the electronic and dance part in him, but he had been resting from all that and had dedicated himself to investigating more about ritual music. But he interested me. We had long conversations about the tone this work was going to have. Until the pandemic arrived and everything changed, the work took a turn towards music with an even deeper meaning”, Vicente García recalls about the genesis of Camino al Sol, an EP of five songs that cannot be heard separately because a composition it is chained and resignified with the one that follows.

Camino al Sol, Desvanecer, Circles of the Sun (in English), Jugar a vive and Saber fluir are the five tracks that make up the most recent album by the Dominican winner of three Latin Grammy Awards – in 2017 for best new artist, best album singer-songwriter, with his album A la mar, and best tropical song for Bachata in Kingston–.

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Vincent Garcia soon he will have a symphonic show in Puerto Rico and he is scheduling concerts in Bogotá, Medellín and a couple of other cities in the country that are yet to be confirmed. This talked about its production.

‘Camino al Sol’ is an experimental musical journey that is full of emotions, especially because of what we have experienced with covid…

Yes. When the pandemic exploded it became very clear to us that we wanted to work on all those questions we had about death, the fact of losing loved ones, family, friends, put us in perspective of our reason for being here in this world. They were questions that at another time we did not have time to ask ourselves and even less to answer, they did not seem important to us. Personally, it touched me a lot; all those doubts, that search to rethink how we see religion, spirituality, certain things beyond the objective of life.

Was the production of such an album very different?

Yes. It was a block job, we recorded together at the Audiovisión studios in Bogotá, and then we added some layers at home, such as synthesizer sounds, for example.

It was a work of much experimentation with strings, we used African instruments such as an Ethiopian harp and the krar -a lyre with 5 or 6 strings and a bowl-shaped soundboard, originally from the south of Mali-, we looked for a sound that would allow us to from the comfort zone, from the chords of traditional harmony and search for a voice in those sonorities. We have Teto Ocampo (guitarist and composer), who is one of the musicians who has contributed the most to contemporary music in Colombia and accompanied us in that experimentation.

It was a work that was interrupted in a certain way because it needed us all to be in the studio, and some of them got infected with covid so we had to reschedule the sessions, that gave it a little more intrigue, you know, of fellowship because we all wanted to finish but there was a certain impossibility . In the end we were a brotherhood, one worried about the other and that is felt in the music. The pandemic generated that, one began to pay more attention to the other, to see it more closely.

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How was the documentation to make an album with those characteristics?

I was curious and for a long time I had been collecting some instruments such as the monochord, the hurdy-gurdy -an illustrious unknown among string instruments and widely used in European popular music-, which have a slightly different character considering the ones we use in popular music: bass, guitar, piano. I started looking for instruments from Africa, from the East, harps, flutes, and I also got a lot of vinyl. It was a fieldwork that at that time did not look like that, but as part of an experimentation trip with Richard, we referred to such a tribe that uses such a song for the birth of children, we wanted to begin to understand the work of music and things like Tibetan songs…That’s why the album doesn’t have a single or a main cut, it’s a compact work of five songs because we’re not looking for one to be the hit of the moment, it’s more like a landscape with which people identify.

The search and conceptualization work, precisely because of the pandemic, took many turns, we searched a lot in the indigenous part of Colombia, we immersed ourselves in what Peter Gabriel did in his beginnings, also because Richard worked with him at that time, and we searched in African and Oriental songs. The album was transformed, but that’s how we began to travel down that road.

How would you define that trip you made?

It was a beautiful encounter with a part of the music and spirituality that I needed and that in a certain way, although I have made tropical music, I had been trying to incorporate them through songs from the countryside, from the Taínos, from the indigenous people; I always felt that curiosity and with this work I got very close, however I think I did not get to the place, but it was a great approach. Camino al Sol does not have the truth, it does not imply that I am only going to make that music now, it is the photograph of the moment that I lived.

We would say that it was a nice parenthesis in his career…

Exact. I’m already working on new bachatas, in a month I’m going to Miami to finish some more danceable songs. Now, it’s possible that I’ll do other songs like the ones on Camino al Sol, if it comes out on the guitar, chords that have to do with that, but it wasn’t that I reached a place of enlightenment. I think that was the great learning, understanding and questioning but remembering that you live in this life, on the physical plane, with people and that we are all spiritual by virtue of being human, you do not have to be connected to a current to be .

SOFIA GOMEZ G.
CULTURE
@s0f1c1ta

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