ENSEMBLE 010 - Marina Herlop : Cuando coño se dice ole

The nature of our current time, amplified by social media and pop culture, has generated a concept of the artist as a winner or idol. In order to legitimize themselves, musicians are exhorted to follow ‘celebrity canons’: having a flashy image or making flashy music, being charismatic, being successful. The creative process is often seen as esoteric and associated with cryptic and vague concepts such as ‘inspiration’, ’talent’, ‘expression’ or ‘freedom’, so it seems music is created magically, in a spontaneous way. As a reaction to this phenomenon, the interview excerpts in this podcast come to remind us that the music profession still consists for a lot of us on a profound devotion. The stress is not on the subject but on the sonic object they generate through constant dedication, a nerd and perseverant investigation, many times in loneliness, where frustration, failure and alienation take place. The compositor or interpreter is not anything but a mere channel of expression of something much bigger than their own persona. Parallelly, the tracks chosen for this podcast also resonate with this idea. This music arouses admiration and interest precisely because it doesn’t look like a desperate claim for attention but a beautiful consequence of this commitment with something pure that comes from a superior order. The popularity or circumstance in which the artist lives is something absurd in comparison to what is laying in the realm they can enter when they make music.