"Weird noisy ambient spoken-word" with los esteroides
“Our voice is really the prettiest, no-cost instrument.”
It’s a brand new year, so it’s time for some brand new music. January 1st already brought a new wave of releases that I’m excited to start digging into, and I’m happy to share one of the first albums of the year with you (and an interview to go with it!).
Ciudad Elefante by los esteroides dropped on the New Year. It plays out like a journal entry being read to you in a dream - noisy static and haunting loops soundtrack confessional passages. Whether you understand Spanish or not (I don’t), the emotions come through in the gentle noise, the instrumentals guide you along with hypnotic chimes and an oddly comforting ambiance despite the melancholy.
los esteroides is César Larriva, who makes “weird noisy ambient spoken-word tracks” or “spoken worms”. He also runs the interview webzine, Los Junk Dealers, and conducts interviews for Sonemic. There’s a certain cinematic aspect to his songs, likely influenced by his film school background. I was amused to learn that he actually edits the songs in a video editing software - so it’s like, literally cinematic.
Sure, you’re not supposed to use Adobe Premiere for music editing, but who cares - it’s all about what’s intuitive. And that mindset is built into the DIY spirit of los esteroides. “Most of what I do now is strictly guided by approaching things with curiosity and compassion— for myself and others,” he explains. “I don't really know what I'm doing when making music, but I trust that it comes from an honest place and I hope that’s enough.”
The two of us chatted over email about the album, and you can read the interview below.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Hi, I'm César. I'm 22. I'm very grateful for this space, really. I'm chronically addicted to posting Insta stories and trying to get back into filmmaking. I also really like coffee, cooking, and Animal Crossing. I'm the (self-appointed) biggest Unwound fan, and I play Fortnite a little bit more than I'd like to admit. I'm not good at it, though. And of course, I love writing, in many different forms.
How long have you been making music?
I started doing music relatively late in my life. I had always been laser-focused on only doing film stuff and never felt capable of doing anything else. I was always, however, very interested in the idea of making music for a lot of reasons, mostly because I had been a music nerd for the longest time. But untreated ADHD and perfectionism had me paralyzed for most of my teens, so I never really learned an instrument or how to use any DAW's or any music theory, and most of the work I did in film and writing was done under extreme pressure or with other friends' help. This unsustainable way of making art eventually made me take distance from filmmaking and art for a couple of years when I dropped my filmmaking major.
That being said, getting myself out of film school may have been the best decision I could've made. When I did, I felt like a total coward for the first couple of months, but these last few years I've gotten to try and do a lot of other things I never thought I'd do, because I didn’t have that “needs to be perfect” mentality I’d poisoned myself with for years. Making this project has probably been the biggest expression of that personal journey.
As of last month, it's been three years since I attempted to take my own life. I hope this isn't a gloomy note to start with—I swear I'm actually really funny!—but that, coupled with wrapping this album up after some years of journaling, has had me thinking a lot about how truly grateful I am to be in a better headspace. Making up for lost time but grounding myself in the present. Being kind to myself but pushing to do better. Trying to balance those.
Can you walk me through your creative process a little bit?
Because I truly am learning as I go, it’s all been really intuitive. Usually it starts from a loop—it’s either me running my voice through effects, trying to mimic instruments, singing, or trying to make really weird sounds (because our voice is really the prettiest, no-cost instrument). Or I could also be making patches on my synth, buying very cheap, old and fucked up vinyl and scouting their content or recording stuff on Koala Sampler when I'm outside.
I'm a very big Scott Cortez and Tim Hecker fan, so I think that still shows a lot in the textures I gravitate towards. I try to figure out how to make those soundscapes more interesting, or sometimes I just let them go for hours. If I get hypnotized, I figure I've found a good sound.
I love loops. I love repetition. I love finding a sound I can live in for a while. It’s the kind of feeling I’d imagine I’d get if I discovered a new color. I love sounds that make you confused about what you're hearing. A friend recently said—when I showed him a Cities Aviv track, "The Final Spark"—“I don't know which parts of what I'm hearing are real and which aren't.” That’s the kind of thing I'd like to achieve.
Also, I think a lot about very specific architectural pieces and places when I'm making these. Places I'd like the songs to be played at. Also, I love the sense of immediacy I have with this way of making music, I can really make sure they feel actualized. Record on Ableton and edit on Premiere Pro. It allows me to add that cinematic feel to it, but a sound engineer would probably kill me for doing this.
These were once only thought of as backdrops for my writing, but I’ve developed this sense of “these are songs first and foremost" so I usually pull from my list of writings and journals, but the texts end up changing around a lot so the writing and instrumental don’t feel independent from each other but part of one whole product.
Can you tell me more about the architecture of your sound? What kind of places do you imagine? What kind of audiences?
I have a very uninformed, purely aesthetic love for architecture. I have been trying to get more into the philosophical aspects about it. Mexico City has a lot of places that I love in that regard. One personal favorite of mine is the ‘Centro Cultural Elena Garro’ library. Fernanda Canales’ work in general I find very interesting. Even Parque La Mexicana I find to be very beautiful, but that one’s existence could be way more criticized.
I love avant-garde architecture and constructivism. I feel I’d like to soundtrack a place in the more Brian Eno sense of ambient: music made to be passively listened to in a specific place, for everyone. Maybe even music that plays itself passively and organically, like a more evolved idea of door chimes, rain drums and wind pipes. This reminds me I'd really REALLY like to see and listen Burnley's Singing Ringing Tree in person. I wish I was smart enough to be an architect, I really respect them.
To clarify a little - are the bichos y aventuras tracks songs that were cut from Ciudad Elefante? Or were these separate tracks you were experimenting with concurrently?
bichos y aventuras was a very impulsive compilation I made of just a bunch of stuff I would send to my friends through WhatsApp. These all came from the dozens of sit-downs I had while trying to find sounds for Ciudad Elefante. I thought it would be funny to make some sort of novelty album full of very specific song titles and stupid tracks, especially because most of these sound just a tiny bit desperate and crazy.
But I really put in a lot of what I consider “interesting sounds,” if that means anything to anyone. For actual tracks that were meant to be used at one point for the album, there’s that “croquis a ciudad elefante” EP. “maridos,” and “ad hoc, pd. etc.” were two meant to be there when I started but they didn’t really fit in at the end, and honestly I didn’t feel they were good enough to force into the album.
Have you always lived in Mexico City?
I've been in Mexico City since I was three and I’m most likely staying here for a long time. It's a huge part of me and what I do, definitely. I hate it here sometimes—just sometimes. In regards to the project, I'm very conscious of the music scene around here and how unlikely my shit is to fit in, which is fine because even then I’ve found some very beautiful people doing very cool things who are actually interested in what I do. That's enough for me.
What's the music scene in Mexico City like? Are there spaces where you can perform live?
It's a pretty diverse state music-wise. I think I've been mostly involved around the more underground rock and experimental spaces but there's a whole world of electronic artists and reggaeton artists doing very interesting things too. I'll be honest, right now, my bets on who will really be important or consistent on the long run are placed on very few projects, but simultaneously, thanks to some very recent shifts on the scene, a lot of new bands are popping up that I'm very eager to see grow. We do lean a lot into shoegaze, noise rock and emo for underground rock and a lot of academic, avant-garde, feels-the-need-to-justify-itself experimental music, which makes sense given most of the economic incentives here for that come from the government or exist in very elitist spaces from the contemporary art world.
I feel even some of these more unconventional approaches to music are very commodified sometimes and don't really have that transgressive qualities the genres they borrow from once had. I'd only say we should be making scarier music. That doesn't need to be noise, we could have cuter bands. Too cute it feels off, maybe. And we should be more honest, too. Less cutting edges to fit somewhere, less imitative. Still, I have nothing but love for the people who want to make music, really.
Promoters and organizers are a mixed bag. Met some people who I really think and trust are trying their best (shout-out Te Aprecio Un Vergo, I'm writing this on the way to a show of theirs) but I've also had some issues with people going through delusional power trips because of the “cred” they get for doing that, which is lame as fuck. Even then, I think the real issue we have here is with venues. Very corrupt and abusive people running those most of the time. Best case scenario it's run by white kids playing hard to get, worst case scenario the venue got taken over by organized crime.
Ultimately this keeps me a bit uninterested in performing live, maybe except for very limited shows, but also this particular album would be very difficult to play live, it's a very unorganized mess. If someone's interested, I'd be down to version Los Esteroides a la Tiny Desk, I think that'd be a very fun experiment.
Even so, I think right now, things are looking really good for music around here, you just need to find some friends you actually trust and support each other.
I really like this confessional style you have for the lyrics. It's funny because I don't actually know any Spanish, but the emotion on Ciudad Elefante still came through.
That's really great to hear because that has maybe been one of my biggest fears with this album. I honestly thought about making it in English at one point because I felt there weren’t many platforms for me to make people listen to this in Spanish. But this idea was quickly tossed away because it would go completely against my ideals.
I think the Anglo-hegemony in music has made everyone else very sensitive to vocal performances. We don’t necessarily have to understand what’s being said, but we can feel it—and we usually feel compelled to understand it and even translate it. A lot of people learn English this way too, right? This isn’t really the case for most English-speaking people, and at worst they even turn their backs on or diminish the lyrical content of music in any other language. This happens the same way “foreign” cinema struggles to get people to read subtitles or the same way very important or even just interesting texts haven't been translated to English. And this is specifically the case with English-speaking people because English holds power. It is the language of globalization. They don't really need to learn—but we do. I know I’ve really had to, to push my art around, to make myself heard, to get better job opportunities, to reach communities that don’t quite exist around here—and that’s weird.
But (in Metal Gear Solid V fashion, lmao) language constructs realities. My reality is interpreted in Spanish and it couldn’t be well expressed in any other language. I also really want to push for very strange art to exist around here, and a lot of people around me do too, and I want to help. “Makeshift Swahili” by This Heat is about this. Huge influence.
That was very off-track, but all of that was to make the point that I’ve taken a lot of the basic knowledge I have about acting and voice acting to really try to perform how I feel and hopefully break that barrier, even when it’s mostly dead-pan and tired vocal deliveries. Now that I think about it, most of the vocals I did while I was very sick and at home. Recording the vocals has definitely been the hardest part. “juegos; deteriorándose” was especially hard to do because, if you heard that one, I pretty much break down and cry at the end. I could never do a take without doing so, and it kind of works because I always wanted that song to be very uncomfortably vulnerable. That was really a letter I wrote to my longtime friend, and that all really happened, and it’s not filtered in the slightest, but it is exposed very theatrically.
I don't think I've ever heard people sing about their childhood like this, so it felt like something I needed to materialize. We are very dismissive of children and our own childhoods. We think we are above those problems, when in reality they shape a lot of our adult lives. Of course we need to work through that to not live by unconscious impulses, but to do so we have to address it.
I think that’s what I was trying to do with the album. That “elephant city,” is meant to be my own subconscious— this city made of snapshots of my dreams that try to build an image of my inner world, because dreams are the gate to the subconscious, I think. So a lot of what happens on that album are very oneirical reconstructions of my life, because that feels more real than the moments themselves.
Is it intimidating to put yourself out there so honestly and straightforwardly like that, or does it come naturally and just feel..."right"?
It is a bit scary to put myself out there, because not many people listen to this anyway, and for a lot of people that immediately and unfortunately devalues art. So I know for a couple of people I'm just insane and oversharing.
Phil Elverum sings in Microphones in 2020: “Someone else lives in the house I used to live in and soon it will be torn down or burn,” and that line stuck with me because I've always firmly believed that an artist duty is to put yourself out there as imperfect and miserable as you may look sometimes. I think that helps people—knowing that someone was in that house before them and that they can get through it. I hope someone feels that about what I write someday.
I think it's scary to be an open book, but it feels like the right thing to do. The same way Phil has grown disconnected from and a bit cringed by The Glow Pt. 2, that’s kind of how I feel about Ciudad Elefante now. It’s a bit too much for me now, but I think that just means I’m growing. Of course I'm nowhere near that man's songwriting capacities, but I feel very understood by him. Going back to bichos y aventuras, I think that is just to show I don't really take myself all that serious. If I make something like this again, most likely under another name, I'd like for the more happier and comedic aspects of my life to be there too.
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Support Ciudad Elenfante on Bandcamp, and follow Los Junk Dealers and los esteroides on Instagram.
