Autotel’s latest project ‘The Tower’ walks an interesting line between underground music with more popular dance genres. As with much of the music that plays in this line, it presents at the same time dark, obscure overtones while also showing lots of playfulness and whimsicality.
The album was created by Joaquín aka Autotel, in his last months living in Finland, and the composition of the pieces were produced throughout the time of moving places, and reckoning with lots of change. “I let myself do what naturally emerged, so that the outcome would be more a skin-to-skin type of thing, rather than working from a theoretical point of view”
Joaquín named the album after the Tarot card “the tower”, which leads to the introspective nature of the pieces. “My natural impulse was to make everything about the politics of borders, but the process of healing, from an introspective point of view felt much more honest, and I can’t be wrong about what I feel in the moment”.
The album contains a lot of variety and contrasts. The first song could’ve been part of an underground party in a bunker, with brutally dark sounds, which suddenly mutates into a delicate ambient piece. Then, the music becomes very playful and danceable, showing some latin elements as well as clear allusions to mainstream dance styles. The last two songs have an unshakable hypnotic and nocturnal atmosphere to them.
My process starts from creating whatever I am feeling at that moment in my computer, or in the Octatrack. Might be a night that I couldn’t sleep, or some random hour in the day where I am feeling overwhelmed. I end up with all this material lying around, some material is good and some other is not so much. At some point I start feeling that few songs speak to each other; that they form something. That’s when I decide to start a project; I would begin heavily editing in the DAW. In this case, it all depended on what I felt that the song wanted to be. Giving time to the music is key, that helps me listen to the pieces from different points of view.
The album was beautifully mastered by Hugo Paris. Hugo Paris is a french experimental musician whose music reflects a fine sensibility and a fruitful trajectory in the industry. “He understood very well the odd and playful nature of the album, and I was glad to see how well he respected that, while adding a super professional finish to the sound”
