Q&A: Allá

by Angela Bruno

Allá – multi-instrumentalist and mastermind Jorge Ledezma, brother, found-soundsmith and master drummer Angel and chanteuse Lupe Martinez – are kraut-centric Latin psych-poppers bent on a musical and cultural revolution. Jorge, a longtime kraut aficionado who cut his teeth with the now-defunct Chicago band Defender, became a part of legendary Can frontman Damo Suzuki's network of jam-session fiends after meeting in 2001, fanning Jorge's creative fire.

Allá's debut labor of love, Es Tiempo, took four and half years, an ever-evolving troupe of musicians, studio time in Sweden and about $50K out of Jorge's own pocket (!!!) to complete. Pointing to inspirations as varied as Café Tacuba, Beatles-esque experimentation and Marvin Gaye's message, Allá's hypnotic blend of kraut and Os Mutantes-brand tropicalia is anchored by an anvil of an agenda. Under the pastiche and stardust, the ethereal Es Tiempo honors the band's Mexican roots. With song titles like “El Movimiento” ["The Movement"] and lyrics like “no duermas mas” ["stop sleeping"], Allá’s message is subtle yet palpable.

“‘El Movimiento,’ that’s the old rally cry from the Chicano movement," says Jorge. "We wrap it in a cool psychedelic package and it’s poppy and it’s cute and a little scary at times – but it’s there.” Here, Jorge talks about Allá's evolution, his meticulous-meets-mayhem production tactics, and what the hell really happened in all those years between conception and fruition.

Rhapsody: How did you meet Damo?
Jorge Ledezma: A friend of mine ...  a Japanese experimental guitar player, emailed me to tell me that she was gonna be touring with Damo. She gave me Damo's email address. ... You can always just email Damo anytime. I always tell people, if you want to just tell him how much you enjoy his music, he's pretty reachable. So we just started emailing each other.

Defender opened up for ... Damo when [he performed in Chicago]. And we had a pretty crazy set. ... He kind of just accepted me immediately. ... He really understood what we were trying to do. The whole improvisational spirit of it. We just clicked and we kept in touch. ... When he comes out to Chicago, he'll stay with us. He just likes having me around. We kid a lot and I tease him a lot about how he's a hippie. When I had the chance to go to Europe for some production on [Es Tiempo],  I told Damo I’d be in Europe. He was like, "Come and play with me. Let's go do this, let's go do that." 

How has working with him influenced you? Are there any traces of Damo on Es Tiempo?
Working with Damo has definitely soaked up on me. I never even thought about it before until I finished the record and I was like, "Oh sh*t." I tried to get him on the album a few times – but he doesn’t like to do recorded stuff. He likes the live audience. So, that's the hardest part. .... When I toured with him, I'd say, "Oh, that show wasn’t very good. ... I don’t know about that show." He'd be like, "Jorge, shows aren’t good or bad. They're just different. Every show is different. It depends on the audience." So, I really took that to heart.

The album took about four and half years to complete. How come?
It initially started as a Defender album in '01 ... we were all paying for it and producing it all together and then the band ran out of money. And I got the bug ... so I just picked it up and went into the studio and just started working on it. And it didn’t really become Allá  until about '02, until I had the idea of doing it in Spanish. Lupe, our singer, wasn’t even involved 'til '04. It was a gradual process, the whole idea of it. I didn’t have it demo'ed out, so I took the idea of Damo – the spontaneity of it –  I was so into that at the time. And I would just go into the studio with nothing really planned – which is probably the worst thing to do – which is why it took forever! [Laughs.]

I didn’t even have a band. It was just me and my brother. We enlisted a lot of local musicians and that took a while too because we didn’t know that many people ... so it was this whole organic process. And there was no deadline – since we weren’t on a label – so I was like, "Let's just do it!"

So, there was a lot of "instant composing" going on?
Yeah, definitely. "Un Dia Otra Noche" was written in the studio. "El Movimiento" was written in the studio. "Un Pedazo" was actually one of the few songs that I actually wrote before I got in there.  I'd say about 85 percent of the songs were written in the studio. ... [We'd all meet up] and make the magic happen. [Laughs.]

How did you bring Lupe into the fold?
It was totally one of those VH1 moments. A friend of mine called me and told me he saw this singer at an open mic. And I had totally visualized my singer way before the album. ... I needed to find a singer that's Mexican-American like my brother and I , can sing, can play guitar, can write her own songs and have a look – a charisma. And sure enough, it took a couple of years, 'cause I had that idea in '02, and this happened in '04 finally. ... So I went and saw Lupe perform, and immediately, after the first few notes, I knew she was our singer. I gave her a copy of the album – which was all music at the time and it took her a few weeks to listen to it. ... She emailed me and I pretty much sequestered her at a Mexican restaurant and told her you have to be a part of this.

The good thing about Lupe is – she's definitely not the big music nerd like my brother and I. She sees things sort of generally. And she doesn’t know any of these groups that we talk about. She keeps us grounded. Like if I want to do a song that's a half an hour long, she's like, "Nooo!" [Laughs.]

Why did you name yourselves Allá?
I read an article in National Geographic about the whole movement of immigrants. It was about a small town in Mexico and all the men are gone, and it's just the women that live there. They are all waiting for their men to come back – and they kept referring to the U.S. as "allá" [over there]  – "estan allá, nos esperan allá" [they are over there, they're waiting for us over there]. And then it just hit me. I'm like, "Sh*t, that’s who we are." We're allá, in between.

You say that Allá and the music were born from necessity and struggle ...
Latin music sucks right now. That’s definitely inspiration for the album. So I knew that if I wanted to do something interesting – and especially for Latin music, which is in dire need of something interesting – it had to be innovative. [That was] definitely a motivating [factor] for [the album] to be in Spanish.

I've been at Whole Foods for 14 years, my brother works at Whole Foods. And Lupe, she sings at Potbelly, it's kinda like Subway, and they ask artists to go and perform there at lunchtime. So that's what she does seven days a week. So, I put all my heart and thoughts into it.You know, very patient, four years on it. And doing all this Damo stuff and touring with him and that was great and getting all this attention from it ... but I was like, "I've got this great record, but it's not done yet and I'm still working on it ..."

And the way we did the album, it was pretty expensive. When I went to Sweden, it cost me $4000 to rent four days in the studio. ... I spent about $50,000 of my money on it. So I was putting a lot on it, but I had this mentality like ... if this record is gonna get picked up and get attention, it's gotta sound great.

Can you talk a little bit about the way you arranged the music? You traveled, you sort of had this network like Damo has, you had all these instruments, ensembles, a horn section ...
When a song would start to build, a lot of times, it usually started with guitar – because it was just me and my brother in the studio. And then the next day, I would book somebody to come in and do something else. I guess I would have the big picture immediately of what I wanted from the song. ... I'd have to ask around to see who could play what, who could play this. ... And if I had a friend of mine, and he was incredibly busy, I'd just get him for that one day and basically play him every song we had, and he'd go in and lay down his little part for everything.

Everything was built up piece by piece, session by session. When we did "Un Pedazo" – that had a 114 tracks. Every string, every vocal, every percussion instrument. When we mixed it, we had the whole board filled up. So, the whole studio was being used for this song. We [he and engineer Colin Studebaker] both said, when we were mixing the album, "We can't do this again." [Laughs.]

It's a music album – it's not a band album. It's all about enhancing the song as much as possible. If I heard something in my head, we were gonna try it. And if it worked we kept it, and if it didn’t ... I always wanted to make a record that when people listened to it, every time they listened to it, they'd hear something new.

So, in a way, it's very different from the live improvisational feel of your influences.
Absolutely. That's the duality. Allá is completely different live, it kind of takes on those krautrock influences and Can influences. It’s a little more dynamic ... we play with a lot more force. There are no acoustic instruments ... it's all electric guitars. That’s when I can get psyched out. [Laughs.]