Ox en Mayo Alto: Lost But Happy

In “Retromania: Pop’s Addiction to Its Own Past” (2011), Simon Reynolds offers us a rather sharp interpretation of the contemporary music industry. 

On the positive side, Reynolds insists that, as never before in history, music has expanded to atomic levels. Especially thanks to what we understand as indie or independent music.

It is difficult for many to determine what it is, with some considering it a genre in itself, while others see it as encompassing a wide variety of sub genres and styles like Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Alternative Indie, POV: Indie, etc.

However, what we can agree on is that it is characterized by its artisanal, DIY (do it yourself) approach to production and promotion. Indie music is distinguished by its creative and commercial independence, allowing artists to manage their projects without the constraints of the conventional music industry. This independence has been made possible by the accessibility of tools and resources needed to produce music, which has allowed artists of all levels to create songs, albums, and entire symphonies from the comfort of our homes.

Technical improvements have brought within reach of the working classes the necessary inputs to be able to produce songs, records and entire symphonies indoors. Thus, it has become relatively low the necessary investment to make us in our respective rooms of sound boards, microphones, antipops, DAWs and computers that allow us to process sounds in a more than satisfactory way. 

We independent artists have managed, perhaps unwillingly, to eliminate the expensive intermediary that recording studios represented during the 20th and early 21st centuries. This “overcoming”, so to speak, has also invited contemporary musicians to take an interest in new branches of sound aesthetics: it is no longer only our instrument and the hours we dedicate to the perfection of performance that matter, it is no longer only our amplifier and the different ways in which it responds to our playing that matter, but also now it is crucial to understand what happens with our pedals, our plugins, our Shure M57, our audio editing programs, etcetera.

In this context, the supposed orphanhood in which we independent musicians now inhabit, completely emptied of major labels interested in our music, but also emptied of the technicians who “ordered” our compositional chaos, has pushed us to professionalize ourselves to the core.

Ox en Mayo Alto, our band, started producing music precisely in this context. Not only far from the contemporary music industry but also, and as strange as it may seem, from what we understand by “society”: our first EPs were composed, designed and formed in the fateful months of the COVID pandemic confinements. The impossibility of seeing our friends and loved ones pushed us to “tell” ourselves another story about the world, as if, behind the pandemic, the deaths, the vaccines, the generalized pain, there was a total silence, a deep doubt, a new space that allowed us to create another universe. 

As a band formed during the boom of the Internet era, we began to draw digital links between our compositions and other artistic expressions: from poetry to narrative, from plastic arts to multimedia arts, from theater to the cinematographic world.

However, as Reynolds says, not everything was and is beneficial in the new landscape of Western music. The impact of technology, while opening the way for new forms of musical experimentation, seems to have rendered musical scenes that once required analog work automatable and reproducible. This scene, taken by itself, is not necessarily negative. An example of successful application may be the case of much of hip-hop culture, which managed to develop as such through the “dabbing” and reversion, always technical, that is, technological, of old musical materials. 

This phenomenon becomes, yes, somehow harmful, every time it is tied to the demands of the market, nowadays determined by speed, instantaneity and the need to mass-produce contents.

In the form of canned products, these new contents seem to be emptied of content. The most popular genres of our time (from certain expressions of pop, to certain expressions of standard rock, trap, reggaeton, among others) sometimes provoke the suspicion that the same drum machine, the same chime, the same chord progression under the same tones, the same harmonic and melodic cadence seem to be the sound background of our time.

The infinite repetition of the canned does not seem to be the only problem highlighted by the British critic.

Simon Reynolds insists that the fragmentation and diversity of the musical panorama has resulted, in most of its expressions, in an “addiction” to the past. Nostalgia, the fruit of a spontaneous idea that “everything past must have been better”, invites us today to a constant recycling of sounds and styles of the past. 

Thus, to the infinite repetition of “the canned”, says Reynolds, is added the infinite repetition of “the old”.

How to protect, then and under this new context, any vector of innovation or originality? How to produce an art committed to its time and its own message? How to incorporate what is valuable in today’s world and yesterday’s world to produce the music of tomorrow? How to surf the wave, protecting the spiritual core of our projects, but at the same time without being swept away by it?

At least our position, that of Ox en Mayo Alto, but also that of many other bands, even friendly bands nucleated in Sepulchral Silence, seems to be the one that in chess is known as Zugzwang: the one in which any move allowed means worsening the situation. 

How can it get worse, then, for the better?

We would like to make the music of tomorrow, without knowing how.We would like to be able to make a living from our product, without knowing how to market it. We would like to enter the necessary circuits, but without knowing them.We would like to be part of the contemporary world, but far enough away from it. 

It sounds like a whim, like dangerous behavior, but also like a kind of addiction: that of driving at full speed, knowing that far ahead, as soon as the curve ends, there is a wall. So far, we have only one answer: we do it because we like it, because it allows us to inhabit like nothing else our own body and the universe we have narrated to ourselves; but above all because, honestly, we know no other way.