Federico Aubele

(July 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Photograph by Brian Liu

Argentine genre-bender Federico Aubele's second album, Panamericana, builds on the confident sophistication of his debut, Gran Hotel Buenos Aires, delivering a similarly enticing blend of electronic music and traditional styles like tango and bolero.  To build the appetite for Panamericana [coming in September], Aubele released a live EP (Live @ Stubbs's) exclusively on iTunes at the beginning of summer, and embarked on a tour supporting Bebel Gilberto, performing his lush songs acoustically.

Aubele took some time out from his summer schedule to tell The Red Alert about the evolution between his debut and the new album, the loss in translation between Spanish lyrics and English ears, and the couple styles of music that just won't fit in his musical blender.

You’ve said that the new album is more of a songwriter’s album.  What lessons did you learn from making Gran Hotel Buenos Aires (great album, by the way) that helped you grow as a songwriter?

During Gran Hotel Buenos Aires, I was more trying to understand what my sound was like, so that led to more experimentation and longer instrumental parts. Having understood that, it was a lot easier to write the songs on an acoustic guitar and just arranging them in that particular way.  First I had to develop the sound, and  then I could go back to the actual songwriting.

How do you know when a song is finished - how do you know when to walk away?  Is it usually pretty clear?

It depends, I think most of the times I work on the song until it comes to a certain point where it sounds almost finished and then I let it rest for a while. Then I go back to it and adjust different things like lyrics, maybe add a variation in the middle, etc. Then rest again, then go back to it.  Doing this a couple of times is enough usually know when to finish the song. 

Are you writing songs constantly, or do you prefer to be in a certain headspace when it’s time for writing?

I’m usually writing songs all the time. However, there are certain situations, especially emotional situations, which are very good for this. It’s harder to be in a writing mood when you have a lot of everyday things to take care of. So sometimes it’s more like going out and doing as many common things as you can, so you buy time and can go back to songwriting mode.  Daily meditation, having time for going through your thoughts and feelings, et cetera, are situations that can stimulate the creative process.  

How much do audiences lose if they’re unable to understand the lyrics?  Do you feel like listeners can still take away as much as Spanish-speaking listeners, even if they have the wrong idea of what the song is about?

I feel that the experience is different in every case. But at the end of the day everybody’s experience is different when it comes to listen to music. If you understand the lyrics, and if you pay attention to them, you will have a emotional experience witch is the result of the combination of both lyrics and music. If you don’t understand the text (or decide not to pay any attention to it), you just get a musical experience, just the emotions that the music transmits. That’s the way I started listening to music when I was a teenager, I couldn’t understand much English but I was still totally into The Beatles.

I was interested in how you’ve said that your musical influences stem from the Americas, from Mexican bolero to American hip-hop.  But rather than talk about the styles you incorporate in your songs, which I’m sure you’ve talked about a thousand times, I thought it may be more interesting to know what sort of music you don’t respond to - what styles or cultural twists on music have left you cold?

I once heard some Eskimo folk music that didn’t say much to me really, sounded like the kind of thing where you  have to belong to that community to understand. No disrespect to the Eskimo community, I just didn’t get it. Heavy metal in all it’s forms (trash metal, any-type-of-metal) I don’t understand either. Baroque music I don’t like much.  Top 40 ballads in general (at least from the '9’s until now) and nowadays Top 40 hip-hop.

Do you feel like most of your biggest influences are already in place, or do you still come across new music that impacts you as deeply as the music that made an impression on you when you were just starting out?

I haven’t heard anything that I like that much lately, but it always comes and goes, so I still hope something new really thrills me. 

Time Out has been producing a series of CD/DVDs in which they ask artists to put together a mix that shows off their homeland.  If they asked you do to the honors for Buenos Aires, who would you make sure wound up on your mix?

Piazzolla, Vicentico, Los Gatos, Cineplexx, Natalia Clavier, and DJ Teem.