Hello Everyone :) It’s been a few weeks since the release of INCORPOREA, the first full length album that I’ve produced for my project KALMO. The experience made me learn a lot. It took me about two years to create the repertoire with the band, record it, mix it and release it. Many or most of the musical decisions had to be done by me. This was something I was not expecting when I put together the band. I thought the tracks would magically get done by just jamming with the band once a week. I slowly realized that someone had to guide the compositions from beginning to end in order to move faster into having them ready for performance and to eventually be able to record them. We officially started jamming on October 2018. I set our first concert date on March of 2019 in order to put pressure on us to get things done. While all of this was happening I was also working a bit less than 30 hours a week as a cook. This made of course the process a bit slower. Nevertheless, we achieved our goal of being ready for that show! The result was good, but a lot of the music was improvised and the compositions were lacking direction. This is when I realized I had to take the compositional responsibility of better structuring the music. I still decided to leave blanks for the musicians to filled in with their talent, creativity and improvisational skills. This I think was the biggest challenge. To fully get to know the strengths of my musicians and to compose music that would perfectly fit their abilities and leave room for them to pour in their identity into the music. We gave five more shows to finish consolidating the music and then we were finally ready to record the album. The winter of 2019 arrived and we started by working on Dancing Light, our first single. Then COVID hit and luckily I was living with Lucia at that time! We were able to record her parts at our home, and whenever possible, very carefully and respecting the health guidelines, I was able to record the rest of the band. The mix took me quite a good amount of time!
Two months before the release of the album I launched a crowdfunding campaign to help me with the costs of production of the album. I learned a lot I must say. It was a humbling experience. On November 20th the album was released! Give it a listen. Let me know what you think!
Here is a review of the album by York Calling if you feel like reading it :)