Anhelo Escalante (I)

Anhelo Escalante has a name that reads like pure poetry, play(ed)s in XYX, one of my favorite bands of the past 500 years (being as they are similar to a good acid trip through the set of Alucarda with the Butthole Surfers and The Pop Group as travel companions) and she also draws and writes just the way I like it. So, I had to interview her.

This is the first part of the interview. If anybody can hook me up with the XYX records, I'll be eternally grateful. And I'll pay for them.

***

PD: Ok, what's going on with XYX?

Anhelo: I'll give you the whole truth. XYX is comprised of two persons now living in separate cities. Mou, the drummer, and I have committed ourselves to so many different projects -musical and otherwise- that it's super hard for us to organize and keep working togeterh. We don't live so far apart from each other, so distance is a little more than an excuse. Mou is part of another band, kinda psych-prog pop, who have just signed to a big record label in Mexico D.F., so he's pretty busy. As for myself, I married the owner of a small record store from Texas, I started a band (still a pretty rough deal) with King Coffey, and kept making solo music here at home.
XYX recorded all through the winter back in Mexico, a total of twelve disastrous pieces, some of them pretty epic. However, when we got down to work on them, we realized we would have to cut them up for technical reasons, and we're still trapped in that process.





PD: A friend from Mexico told me that "The girl from Ratas Del Vaticano and the one from XYX are the wackiest and craziest in all of Mexico"

Anhelo: Well, Violeta and I have been friends and played in bands together since 2004 more or less. We're very different people and do things for different reasons. Truth is, I don't think we're really nuts, I just think we're very resilient. We like to go off about subjects that others won't really dare get into, and we've never really wanted to be in a band to be 'interesting', we've just felt prey to musicians that have accepted and supported us for what we are, instead of telling us how to dress. Let me tell you, she has a lot more formal musical schooling, and that we've both gone to college for things you wouldn't imagine like economics, sociology, psychology...Truth is, I've met lots of chicks way worse than us, we're just different I guess.



PD: What was the state of mind or whatever, if there even was one, when starting XYX? What kind of musical community did you form in?

Anhelo: The state of mind was the influence of LSD. We wanted to do something that sounded like our egos, drum beats and electrical currents channelled through the thick strings of an electric bass. The 'community' back then consisted in a bunch of misfits, angry at the fact that we were being ignored and not payed for our hard musical work, which doesn't seem to be worth shit for many, but that's besides the point. A few of us started to get organized, we built our own studio, some opened a venue, and that's how we collectively made it possible for the Monterrey underground music scene to break into a million possibilities and reach other countries.

PD: Both XYX and Ratas Del Vaticano have become kind of hip bands to listen to amongst the cool elite of American and European punkdom...do you notice much of a difference between how they assimilite/understand/live your music in the States?

Anhelo: As far as american punkdom is concerned, anything that sounds desperately different is considered cool. Pretty much everything is assimilated differently in the States, they have a different background as far as music history goes, but they also have the terrible habit of looking for ten bands that sound exactly the same as one they like a lot. It's kind of like when you try a new pizza and and you start looking for all the restaurantes where they serve it, trying to feel cool about eating it everywhere. Whatever.
In Mexico, people think they're cool for listening to records and tapes from the North American underground, and Americans feel the same about foreign music. I don't want to be misunderstood, in Mexico we don't have as many means to stand out, so if somebody wants to make himself heard, he does, and ends up being the Mexican rarity for foreigners; however, in the States, people keep listening to bands that have ten albums and three year tours playing every damn city in the country, the same music that never evolves, and they still like it, always on the same level. People only turn their heads when something really new comes in. Maybe I'm very strict, or maybe I'm just tired of going to shows and having everybody want to sound the same.