Monte Espina is the electroacoustic, free improvisation duo of Ernesto Montiel and Miguel Espinel, both Venezuelan-born musicians that now reside in North Texas. The duo initially caught our attention with their first proper release, y culebra, that came out on Marginal Frequency in 2019. Their use of amplified sounds/objects and signal processing on that recording created a texturally rich and enveloping soundworld that was rather mysterious and delightfully difficult to pin down. Recorded under heavy circumstances on the eve of Covid lockdowns, the duo pushes those same elements to even more refined heights on their latest release, Pa, on the Elevator Bath label. Free Form Freakout’s David Perron spoke with Ernesto and Miguel of Monte Espina via Google Meet on April 17th to discuss their background making music, their new album, their weekly “training” sessions, and more.

---

Free Form Freakout: For starters, could you guys just share how you two met and began making music together?

Miguel: We were at a concert in Dallas at a place called Pariah. It was a gallery and Yells at Eels was playing, which was the Gonzalez family – Dennis Gonzalez and his two sons, Stefan and Aaron – and some other mutual friends were playing, but I didn’t know Ernesto back then. This was back when I was drinking, but I’m not anymore. I went in there with a friend who drove, so I was like “Ok, cool, I’ll drink a little bit of wine!” I was in a good mood and then I heard some people talking to Dennis after they played. I wanted to congratulate everybody and I heard a Venezuelan accent, so I came up to them and I’m like “You guys are from Venezuela, right?” Ernesto and Raquel, his wife, were just like “Yeah!” So we started talking. About a week later, we saw each other at a couple more shows. Then shortly after that, we were running into each other at Stefan Gonzalez’s series, Outward Bound Mixtape Sessions, and Ernesto and I started talking and he brought up that he’d been playing with some things at home and playing with the guitar and making sounds with it and whatnot. He asked if I was down to play at some point. We met up one time and we just set up and started playing without talking, without thinking of anything, we just started playing. I was recording it. I’ll do that, I’ll just start recording, and we really liked what happened that day. The next day we were texting each other and we were like “Well, what if we made this a thing?” Ernesto came up with the name, the play on words with both of our last names. His is Ernesto Montiel and I’m Miguel Espinel, so we came up with Monte Espina, which sounds kind of like a place, like Mount Thorn would be the best translation of it. That first recording we did, which at the time we weren’t thinking about if it was going to be anything, we ended up uploading it to Bandcamp. Right now, it’s our oldest recording on there. For the rest of that year, we recorded every session we did. 

Is this like 2016-ish? 2015? What year was this?

Ernesto: It was 2016. Maybe now I can give my side of the same story. We moved to Dallas in 2015. Maybe a year before moving here, a friend from Caracas, a writer, we were sharing music. He sent me some Dennis Gonzalez music, a trumpet player who I didn’t know who he was, and I loved the music. When the moving to Texas plan started taking form, I started checking online – “What happens in Dallas? What is happening there?” – and it seems that the place where the city had experimental music was this series called Outward Bound Mixtape Sessions, which was put together by Stefan Gonzalez. Then I noticed that Dennis was not just a Texas trumpet player, but he lives in Dallas! I started going there, somehow started meeting people. One of the early things that struck me is that I saw that Michel Doneda, the French saxophone player, was playing in this gallery space, which is called Pariah. We went to that show, we started meeting people, we met Dennis. Every time we met Dennis at someplace, we would talk with him in Spanish because he is the son of Mexican people. He was born in the valley here in Texas. On the next show at that same spot, Pariah, I think it was Yells At Eels, the Gonzalez trio, with Etched in the Eye, which is a trio of Sandy Ewen and Danny Kamins, and Robert Pearson. We were talking with Dennis in Spanish after the show and then this drunk person talks to us in Spanish like “Hey, are you from Venezuela? I am from Venezuela, too.” It was like an immediate, very sympathetic thing. Then later we started meeting at shows and well, there was another Venezualan around here. At some point, we were just talking “What if we get together?” At that point, Miguel was starting a solo project and the idea was to collaborate somehow. He was doing this Tangential Meandering thing, that was the name of Miguel’s project. We didn’t plan anything, we just started to play and then we listened to the recording. Miguel sent the recording to me and it’s like “Wow!” He proposed, “What if instead of Tangential Meandering, we do something together with this?” And that was the start of Monte Espina.

Well, Miguel, I have a question specifically for you. From reading the notes from your Marginal Frequency release, it had listed in there some of your previous activity, and a lot of it was centered around metal: black metal and doom metal. I was curious where you started to get interested more in free improv and more electro-acoustic stuff. Was that kind of running in tandem at the same time or was this a new discovery for you – kind of branching off in that direction?

Miguel: I grew up as a metalhead. My mom is a metalhead. She was listening to Iron Maiden when I was in her belly and stuff like that. I grew up listening to metal and all my siblings are older than me and they all had friends that were into metal or punk rock and I was brought up with that. When I started playing music, I was mostly playing in metal bands. I came to Texas in 2005, it was like the last day of 2004, really. I found some people to play with. I was in Bryan-College Station, Texas, a small college town. I started playing in a death metal band there.

I was studying computer science at the time and I wanted to move myself into studying music, but I didn’t have orchestra or band experience or anything. So I ended up minoring in music and then eventually turning that into a major and all that. When I was in the music school at Texas A&M, I took a few classes with Jeff Morris. He’s one of the professors there, and he does all the electronic music classes and all the music technology classes. Taking some of his classes kind of opened me up to some of the more experimental, contemporary classical stuff and some electronic music, in general. That’s where I learned to use Max/MSP, which is the software that I use the most right now. So I started playing around with more non-idiomatic music, in general. I was studying composition. I was still playing metal, but most of my more serious composition stuff for school was more in the realm of electro-acoustic music and whatnot. I finished school there and I got into grad school here at UNT, which is where Jeff Morris recommended for me to apply and that’s where he got his PhD from. It’s even more so in that direction; the composition program here is very into, although you can do anything, it’s a good place for electro-acoustic music. I was doing my masters when I met Ernesto and I was already doing some of that. When I first moved to Denton, I found the same group of people. There were people doing no-wave, and there was some metal in there, too. There was some improvisation, there was some noise. It’s a really nice community here where basically people that do any type of music that is not “too traditional” will be a part of the same friend group. I’m actually still playing in a more black-ish metal band called Oil Spill.

Do you seek each other out in some ways?

Miguel: Yes, and if you go to one of the Outward Bound Mixtape Sessions you’ll find that every set or act that plays is basically almost like a different genre within itself, but they’re all friends and they all know each other. You might find another electronic group that’s more dancey, but it still has something that’s unusual to it. You might find a metal or a punk band, and you might find some straight-up free improv and a harsh noise act. Everybody knows each other.

So all the weird music people find each other is basically what it’s like in most towns, right?

Miguel: Yes!!

Quick question for you because you mentioned that you moved to Texas in 2005 and Ernesto you had mentioned it was 2015. Did you guys both move directly to Texas from Venezuela, or were you coming from elsewhere?

Ernesto: We moved straight from Venezuela because Texas has a bilingual elementary school program and there are some organizations that scout for people with a college degree who want to teach bilingually in elementary schools. My wife applied for that and did the program and she got contracted here in Mesquite. At that time, we were not married but she told me that if we got married, “You can come with me.” I said, “Yes, I want to stay with you!” (laughter)

It has worked out then, it has worked out for you (laughter)!!

Ernesto: Yep!!

Is there, I don’t want to say significant, but is there a fair amount of people from Venezuela based in your area then as a result of [different programs like that]?

Ernesto: Well, there are Venezuelans right now all over the world, but there are more Venezuelans in Houston. There’s more of a historical connection because of the oil industry. But around here, yeah I know that there are people. I haven’t met a lot. Miguel is maybe the only Venezuelan friend I have met in the wild because of our interests and those kinds of things.

I think it’s great that you were able to identify one another’s accents, even in a drunken state, Miguel, you were able to do that (laughter)!!

Miguel: I think that aided me in like [snaps fingers]: I hear that (laughter)!!

Ernesto: The funny thing about that is he was drunk, but he had this huge smile on his face and was like: “Are you from Venezuela?” [said in a giddy voice]. It was most amazing (laughter)!!

Well, I have a question for you Ernesto, again referring back to those notes that were from that Marginal Frequency release, y culebra. It mentioned that you had been involved in doing some various improvisation outfits going back to the mid-90’s with a collective called El Jaibo, which it sounded like there were quite a few offshoot projects from that. I was wondering if you could provide some background information on some of those projects that you were involved in? 

Ernesto: Yeah, the first project was called El Jaibo. We took that name from a Luis Buñuel movie. I don’t know the name in English, but in Spanish, it’s Los Olvidados. It’s about all of these kids in Mexico, it’s maybe a 1950’s movie. The antagonistic character in the movie is called El Jaibo, so we took the name from that. It was an open collective. We started with like three friends. None of us had a lot of musical skills. Sometimes I tried to follow where the improvisation idea came from and, I guess, it was a little bit from reading about certain aspects of Sonic Youth and certain aspects of The Dead C. Maybe that influence came from that area of rock music. It was a core of three people, but we rented a space that we used two times a week for like four hours at night and it was an open thing, whoever came could join. We played for almost three years. The funny thing is that at some point we started getting asked to play at rock shows or alternative music shows and stuff like that. Sometimes we were three and sometimes we were twelve (laughter).

Whoever showed up?

Ernesto: Yeah, it was an open situation. Some people came and stayed for some months and then left and some people just came once. They didn’t understand what was happening and were like, “Where’s the music here?” But there was a core of like three people, José Gabriel Hernandez and Jean Paulo D’ambrosio and myself. The other projects that are mentioned, they were more like steady projects, then after that, it was a trio of me on guitar, another friend as bass player, Edgar Moreno, and Henry Rodriguez on drums. Henry was, and still is, a grindcore drummer in the longest-running grindcore band in my city, Maracaibo. Edgar came from more of a Primus-type of bass playing, but it was absolutely improvised. After that, it was also a trio with two other friends. We had this intention of like an acoustic guitar trio thing, Los Jardineros del Chance. That also lasted for maybe four or five years. Right now, I am also talking to, do you know Glorias Navales from Chile?

Yes!

Ernesto: Well, Tomás Salvatierra, at some point we started talking through Facebook and stuff and I sent him some Los Jardineros del Chance recordings. He loved some of those recordings and he released it digitally on his label Esculpido en Mármol. This week we were talking and he’s going to release a tape of that.

Oh, okay, cool!

Ernesto: Los Jardineros del Chance was started by Christian Vinck and I in 1998. After a while Juan Pablo Garza joined us, and we remained as a trio. Around 2000, Juan Pablo moved to Miami and some months later Aquiles Hadjis became part of it.

The cover art of y culebra are two paintings Christian made specifically to be used as such. Juan Pablo Garza helped edit the photos on the Pa cover. Last year, for a University of North Texas open call for audiovisual works that were simultaneously streamed and projected on some campus walls, we did this collaboration with Aquiles, which was used a month later in a festival organized in Maracaibo.

Well, you guys get together for what you call your weekly “training sessions”, which was probably put on hold to a certain extent during the lockdown and with how everything was. I was curious about how you view this scenario differently than just your average band practice? Do you come into this with certain instrumental restrictions or parameters or certain compositional ideas? Or is it just see where it goes when you guys get together?

Miguel: I think one thing that really caught my attention is what Ernesto brought up earlier. Basically, the way these go is the way I described how the first one went. We just hooked everything up and started playing. One thing that I forgot to mention earlier is that some of the music that I had been doing before Monte Espina had some elements of improvisation, including one of the metal groups I was in, Cacodemon. That one was with some local people that do noisier music, my friends Sarah Jay, Trevor Mahaney, and Davis Kouk. We played shows and everything, but it was mostly a metal/noise thing, but we never had songs. We still would call it “jamming” or “playing”. When I first started playing with Ernesto, he brought up the term “training” and we talked about it a little bit. I was like “training?” (laughs). He was talking about it being more like we’re not rehearsing a song, something that’s written, we’re just training the improv muscles, so to speak. Sometimes Ernesto will be setting up and he’ll have the guitar and all the trinkets and whatnot, and I will be deciding what I’m going to play as he’s setting up sometimes. We usually do it at my place, so I don’t have to put everything in a vehicle and go somewhere. Sometimes I’ll be bringing stuff, like OK, I’ll grab this and that and whatnot, and Ernesto never tells me what to grab or what to do or anything, and I don’t tell him anything either. Except for a couple of collaborations where we’ve talked about things after we’ve done one free session, we’re never like “Let’s do this type of curve or this type of structure.” We just set up and play.

Are there ever times where you are like “I’m going to bring this just to see what element this adds to our piece” – this instrument, this equipment or effects or something like that? Do you ever do that just to test the waters and see where it leads to?

Miguel: Yes, and this happens a lot during training sessions. Sometimes some things will stick. A few times I’ve just grabbed random stuff from my kitchen in the middle of a session and that ends up becoming a permanent instrument.

Ernesto: Sometimes we’re in the middle of a training session and Miguel stands up, he goes somewhere, and he comes back with a violin. Then some other times, he stands up, goes and appears with a metal bowl from the kitchen or whisk or something.

So pretty much anything at your disposal could be a part of your improv session then?

Miguel: Yeah, actually that metal bowl that he’s talking about, since the first time I brought it, it just became an instrument and I haven’t used it as a kitchen bowl since then. And it really helps because there are other things that I put in there for transportation, so whenever we’re playing live I just set up my bowl and put all of these things inside it and bring it there.

Maybe I’ll have to start listening for, like, the Miguel snack break mid-set, eating cereal out of that bowl (laughter).

Ernesto: Yeah, and also the idea of calling it training is because it is also the same. It’s not that we just start playing and say: “What about this?” or “How did that sound?” “What happened here?”. No, it’s like a long session; it’s like a set, but we’re practicing the whole improvisation or developing the soundworld. The way I see it, there are like three levels or layers. What I do at home, by myself with the instrument. That would be some kind of practice or research. Then it’s the training sessions, even though some of those sessions have become recordings that are on our Bandcamp or Pa was one of those training sessions. And the other layer would be when we play live, which is a whole different environment where many other things happen there.

I believe you mentioned this already, Miguel, but did you say that you record everything that you do when you get together for these weekly sessions?

Miguel: Yes, with the exception of a few times where I thought I was recording, but that has only happened like 2 or 3 times in the last four and a half years.

I wanted to ask about some of the stuff that is on your Bandcamp page, which there’s quite a wealth of material on there, and you have done quite a number of collaborations with local artists and maybe artists from out-of-town that were passing through, so I was wondering if some of those were just like invites for people to come and take part in your training sessions?

Ernesto: Yeah, we like to collaborate a lot, so sometimes we invite people, but that’s a different kind of training because we are inviting someone to record. Also, we invite a lot of people to play live too. It’s to collaborate; it’s not to expand our soundworld or this or not, just to get together and see where it goes. Some of those collaborations become more steady. There are some people that we invite more constantly, sometimes they are a one-off.

Do you guys do any post-production stuff or are there any embellishments on your releases, or is what we hear the raw recordings from those sessions?

Miguel: No, that’s the short answer. I think it’s interesting sometimes when people ask us, “Is there a sample of something in there?” Usually everything that happens is what happens [on the recordings]. I mean, I do master all of the recordings afterwards, but it’s just mastering what’s there and don’t add anything to it and whatnot. I’ll bring it up and normalize it and things like that, but there is no effecting what happened in the moment and we like that a lot.

Ernesto: Yeah, that thing has been recurring or mentioned with the recent Pa reviews. Some people have assumed that we are using field recordings or samples or other recordings, but no, everything just happens on the spot. The only post-production on the two releases has been the Alan Jones mastering, which turns it into a different soundworld somehow.

Miguel: And it is still just mastering, the same thing that I do at home with the home recordings, just done by a person who does it way better (laughter).

Yeah, I suppose it adds some depth to the recordings where it does at times sound like there are some other things happening in the mix, which gives that sort of illusion of like “What’s going on here? Was there some stacking of tracks?” But I gathered it was all in real time.

Miguel: Yeah, one thing that I think does make it sound like that, I’m assuming, is the fact that some of the methods that we use involve these kinds of delay chains that I designed on Max where some delays can be going on for a while, so I might start doing something else and bypass the delay so that they keep going. So it kind of works like a loop. Ernesto does use a looper pedal among the different things that he uses, so it does sound like there are more people playing perhaps. The closest thing to sampling that I’ve ever done, which I’ve never done live but in a few of the training sessions and it’s one of those things that you were asking about before like if I try anything new, is that sometimes I will grab some app from my phone that does like a fake instrument or something like that. There’s this gamelan app that sometimes I’ve used to play some gamelan sounds in there, but it’s all in real time and I’ll just put the phone to the mic and play around with it. I think that’s the closest to using a sample of something.

But there was one training session two weeks ago, where something hit me and I did pull up a YouTube video of Monte Espina playing and I put that up to the mic for like 2 seconds, so you were hearing us at a different time, but it was going through all of the processing so it was not recognizable.

Ernesto: Also, related to that, Miguel mentioned that I use the loop/delay pedal, sometimes I just like to fade out the loop, and that can make it sound like a recording. It depends, ok, now this loop is going on, what I’m I going to do? Am I going to foot stop it or am I going to fade it out. And to fade it out, to make it open or clear that it was made on the spot.

Yeah, it feels like built-in segues and transitions with some of those sections too. At times it feels like it’s composed. Like with your new one, it feels like there are almost movements within the piece as a whole.

I do want to talk about your latest release called Pa, which was recorded obviously under some pretty heavy circumstances back in March where it was noted that your father, Ernesto, had just passed away just prior to that, you were unable to go back to Venezuela, and all of this stuff was happening on a global level where things were going into lockdown. Given all that was happening at that time, what was sort of the compulsion on your part to create music? I mean, was it a means of coping with what was happening or was it just that sort of ritual of gathering together like you do each week? Was that part of it?

Ernesto: We had scheduled a training session for that Saturday, the 21st. My father had been in bed as a result of a stroke since 2013, but in December of 2019 he had a second stroke that left him unconscious. And because other aspects, like, both Miguel and my passports have expired, and it’s very hard to get a new passport because of the way the government, the dictatorship, has been managing all of the identification, documents and stuff. In December, for me to go to Venezuela when my dad had this stroke that left him unconscious would have been very difficult because at that point there weren’t any straight flights. I would have needed to travel to Panama, then to Colombia, then get to Venezuela. It turned out to be a super expensive thing that I couldn’t afford at that moment. I’m glad that Raquel and I got to go to Venezuela in July of 2019 with the full intention of spending time with the family, which is what we did, but it was like a crazy thing. We needed to go to Bogeta, then fly to another Colombian city. The nice thing is that Maracaibo is just three hours from the Colombian border, so we needed to rent a service that could get you through the border and get you to the city, and the same thing to get back: two flights…it was a complicated thing. But moving forward to March, I got a call from my family that my father passed away. First, I had thought about cancelling the training session that we had planned for that next Saturday, but then I thought “let’s do it.” I thought it would be better. So, we got together, and on that same weekend, the shelter-in-place order was called around here, so that was the last time that we got to play until like August.

I feel like there is an energy that courses through the entirety of that release as things unfold. Maybe not just in regards to this new release, your others as well, but are you sometimes surprised when you listen back to some of your sessions? Do you hear it in a different way than what it was in the moment? Was that something that you felt with this particular session?

Ernesto: Some months later, I asked Miguel to send me that session to listen to it. Well, yes, there is that surprise thing. Sometimes we get together, we record something, and when we finish and it’s like “Oh, this was horrible. This was the worst session ever. This didn’t work.” But you’re in two different places: you are inside of the thing, it’s one position, but once you are listening, that’s an absolutely different position, even with your own material. When I listened to that specific recording 3 or 4 months later, it moved me. It felt good. It felt also like a different recording than from the ones we’ve done before that one. There was a different aspect to it that I thought “Oh, wow, maybe this one could be released.” So by some intuition, I reached out to Colin Sheffield. I didn’t mention any of the context of the recording. I wanted him to listen to the recording without the weight of my feelings that might be related to it and all of that. I just wanted him to listen to it with fresh ears. When he liked it and wanted to release it, then I told him the whole context.

Well, certainly that backstory adds an extra layer of heaviness to the recording where you listen to it filtered through that lens for sure. As a follow-up to what you said earlier, you talked about just plugging in and working together in that way, but do  you guys have a desire or an interest in working in more of a compositional fashion, or do you want to keep things with Monte Espina purely improvisational?

Ernesto: I think so far we are interested in just keeping on improvising because with the passage of time it just keeps on changing. It’s like an organism or a developing environment maybe, but who knows at some point we may be like “Let’s try something different.” And that “different” might be: what if we set some parameters or something?

We have another friend here with whom we have both played with some times, Andrew Miller, and he has been developing for a couple of years some graphic scores. And sometimes we have played with him and it’s following those scores. At the start for me, it was very difficult and sometimes annoying because from my side of things I’m developing sound and I’m listening to the whole sound that is happening in the room or in the place, so now I need to look at some graphic thing and follow along and it sort of puts me out of the soundworld because it’s sort of a visual world.

Right, you become more cerebral where you’re not listening quite as closely because you’re trying to process what’s on the page, so you lose that element.

Miguel: And we did both participate, not as Monte Espina, but separately with some graphic scores with Adam Goodwin. He’s a bass player from Texas who lives in Berlin right now. He was visiting and both of us played in that ensemble and a few others that we have collaborated with: two of my band mates from that metal band that I told you about and our most frequent collaborator was in there too, Louise Fristensky. It was definitely something different. I don’t have an aversion to graphic scores because I do graphic scores as a composer, and I do just regular prescribed notation as well and usually a combination of both. But I think for Monte Espina the philosophy has always been about being in the moment. With a few exceptions, there have been a couple of collaborations that we’ve done, that after a full session that is completely free, whoever we are collaborating with might have an idea like “Let’s try something structured just for fun.” So we’ll think about some type of shape or whatever and we’ll do it. It’s a good exercise. There was one time where we did something that was completely free. It was a special thing where we played with radios, and the whole thing was playing with radios. It was for this event in Austin called Transmissions.

Ernesto: Yeah, it was SoundSpace. Transmissions was that edition of SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum.

Miguel: And we basically did the same process that we usually do with instruments and trinkets and objects, but we used radios instead. Ernesto was using his same pedals and I was using my same patch, but we were just using radios as the sound source. It was a very good exercise as well. It makes you think in a different way.

Well, that’s a nice little segue because Ernesto I wanted to ask you about your radio program called Sonido Tumbarrancho that you have on KUZU, a community radio station in Denton. As someone who does community radio myself, I just have an interest in seeing what others are doing and what those stations are like. How did you get involved in that station and what’s the kind of the general programming and maybe other things that station does to be involved in the creative community in your area?

Ernesto: KUZU has been going on now for 3 or 4 years. The seed of KUZU was Peter Salisbury and a few other people with an AM transmitter from his apartment in Denton. If I’ve heard correctly, he used to live around the square, some organization after some years reached out to him and asked if he was interested in developing an LP FM community station and, well, he got involved. He put together a group of people and he started KUZU.

My involvement with KUZU was first for like a year, maybe every six weeks, a friend of ours, Sarah Ruth Alexander, started inviting me on to her radio show. I also DJ sometimes around here, so she liked what I DJ’d. I would DJ specifically between sets at shows and also in some other environments. So from listening to that and we got to talking, so she started inviting me onto her show as a guest. At some point, she and another person started to push me like “Why don’t you have your own radio show?” I was very hesitant because if I started a radio show, I knew I would have to devote a lot of time to it. It was going to take a long time and I’m going to get very involved, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that.

Once Sarah went on tour, she is also a musician. I’m not sure if you have heard any of her music, but she is great. She just released a duo recording with Damon Smith, the bass player. She also has some solo recordings as Sarah Ruth, and she was also a part of another great duo that when I moved here was one of my favorite acts, They Say the Wind Made Them Crazy. Oh well, she went on tour with Ausukubus, another project for two weeks, and I was in charge of her program. I did the program by myself two times, and when I finished the second show I was like “OK, I need my own radio show!”

You got the bug! You were committed!

Ernesto: Yeah, I put together an “evergreen show” that they call it and I applied for the project. First, I just wanted to do it once a month because I don’t live in Denton. I live in Mesquite, which is a 45-minute drive, but still, I go to Denton at least once a week. Miguel lives in Denton, I have many friends that live in Denton, the radio station is there, we play many shows there, so somehow I’m involved in Denton. I asked for the show to be once a month and I also wanted it to be a late-night show, like at 10 o’clock, because the kind of music that I am interested in including in the show is better to do later at night. Well, they told me that I could do it every two weeks because there was another producer that would be a good fit to alternate Thursdays. Well, I asked to do it once a month, now I’m on the second and fourth Thursday, and then I asked if there is a fifth Thursday can I do that too (laughs)!! So now, I sometimes do three shows a month. But, yeah, KUZU is a community station. Many of the producers are also musicians who live in Denton or are involved in other cultural types of activities. Denton has a community feeling that I haven’t felt in other parts of Dallas and less here in Mesquite, where we just live in this apartment and are close to the three main highways that can take us anywhere. We live here because my wife’s work is like fifteen minutes away from home, so it’s very convenient to live here.

But you feel closer to the community in Denton is what you’re saying?

Ernesto: Oh yes, and certain parts in Dallas, particularly in Oak Cliff, but also in Denton. In Denton you get to feel some type of community closeness. The social thread is more thick than other parts of Dallas.

I also wanted to mention that I did radio in Venezuela during the 90’s. We were a group of like 3 or 4 people, but we had a daily show in the afternoon. That was my prior experience with radio. When I started Sonido Tumbarrancho here, I started to notice that I would sometimes come short with my English and my expressions, but what I listened to that gave me the most light was your podcast. The way you were talking, the way you expressed, the way you gave out information and all of that. It was like “Ok, there is a tone and I’m going to learn some ways of expressing things out of David”. So that’s a funny coincidence (laughter).

Well, I’m glad it’s at least somewhat coherent then because I cringe when I listen back to it most of the time (laughter).

Ernesto: Yeah, I also cringe when I listen back to it. Because of the pandemic, the station has been closed, so we’ve been recording shows from home. Because I haven’t tried the proper equipment here, Miguel has been helping me. I make a program. I send him a whole set of instructions, along with the music. I record myself on a very nice app on my phone in a closet. I hate it! I don’t like it! The studio just opened back up last week and it was like “Oh, what a relief!!” just to do it live.

That sounds very similar. For months we couldn’t go into the studio, and I’ve only recently begun to go back. I could tell the dip in quality. The music didn’t sound good from my home set-up, the mic breaks didn’t sound good, so it was a huge relief to go back. I think the first show that I did from start to finish at the studio again was that last Graham Lambkin one. That was all recorded at the station, and it was like “Finally!!”

I just have one last typical wrap-up question for you. Do you have anything in the works? I know that live shows are still up in the air, or has some of that started to happen where you’re at? Are people booking shows yet?

Ernesto: Oh yes! I wanted to mention a very special place here in Oak Cliff in Dallas called the Wild Detective because I also book shows here in Dallas. I started booking at the Wild Detective. It’s a bookstore, coffee house, bar, venue, cultural space. It’s owned by a couple of friends who are Spanish guys, Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique. Well, I just started booking shows. The first show that I booked there was Yells at Eels, the Gonzalez family. It was back in 2016, it was like the Wild Detective is around the same area that the Gonzalez’s live and to me it was like “How come the Gonzalez’s have never played the Wild Detective?” Then I proposed a show with Monte Espina and Cut Shutters and Lily Taylor, which we called Further Sounds and that became a series of concerts. At first, it was local people. At some point, maybe Jacob Wick was the first out of town person, then Christina Carter also played in the series, and Michael Foster and Ben Bennett. We started to have more experimental musicians from out of town. We even got to book the first Peter Brötzmann show in Dallas in 2019. So last year, because they have a backyard, Javier came up with the idea of these socially distanced shows. In a backyard that would usually seat 120 people, we would reduce the capacity to 42 people in a socially distanced scheme. People would be seated in pairs. Now, I am the one booking the shows and I’m saying all this because, yes, things are starting to happen again. For this series, we’ll have some local musicians, but I already have some other people from Texas. Charalambides is going to play the series. Claire Rousay is also coming. I’m in talks with Thor Harris to bring him in.

From the side of live Monte Espina stuff,  we are playing in Shreveport in late May. There is a space called Minicine? that is run by David Nelson, one of the most amazing hosts we have met. We’ll be playing there on May 28th.

On the recording side of things, we are talking with a label [about a new release], but I don’t want to mention anything until it’s fully, fully, 100% going to happen, but it seems that it’s happening.

In 2019, Liz Tonne, who is a vocalist that was part of this Boston improvisation group in the early 2000’s with Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley, was living in Dallas and we got to meet her and we started collaborating with her sometimes. Our favorite local collaborator is Louise Fristensky. She is a person that we’ve played with most. She is currently working on her dissertation right now for composition for her PhD. So for one of these collaborations, we had this idea of what if we invite Liz and Louise and play together as a quartet. We loved it, and we did it again. When Liz announced that she was moving back to Massachusetts, we were like “Okay, let’s go into the studio to do some recording.” We did a small Texas tour, like Denton, Houston, and Austin and all of that. So we have been working on that recording, there have been some philosophical differences about how to put out that recording, but that’s in the works. That’s probably going to be the next recording that will be released.