Drawing Music: Nelson Ponce

Nelson Ponce
13.10.2023
5 minutes reading

If I could describe my relationship with music in one word it would be: intense. I imagine that almost all Cubans have such a relationship with music, and I don't think it is typical of all human beings, but that our culture especially makes people define themselves through music.

I'm always trying to relate to more music, it helps me to quench a thirst for knowledge, for discovery. All the time I associate it with feelings and different traits of my personality: it defines me at every moment. It's an enigma, to discover in each track what is in me.

There is also a professional part. Something that I have induced and toned over time because, as I love music, working for it is a pleasure, and it drives me to want to discover and listen to things that probably in my natural environment I wouldn't listen to. I love working with young musicians because they tend to be a little more accepting of what one proposes to them, and I like to be part of that training and development in terms of image.

The inspiration, for example with an album, I always find it precisely in that music, and in a series of counterparts of this: in the stereotypes and the ways of treating a genre, for example, that I don't use as a reason to resemble them, but precisely to contradict them. That also requires a search around how a type of music is treated visually, how an artist manifests himself on stage or what he wants, where he wants to go. I am inspired by the artist's personality and try to translate his music in visual terms.

Depending on the moment and the music, I look for inspiration in nature, in life, in the possible urban tribes that listen to it, in places that sometimes I don't belong to, but I do the exercise of learning and discovering clues in those genres and in the things that define them.

The presence of music in my daily life is a very high percentage because as we live in such a musical country, many times I am forced externally to listen to it. On occasions when I need silence for certain things, the society in which we live -which is basically sonorous-, does not allow me to do so. But that has also taught me sonorities that perhaps otherwise I would not listen to or would not be interested in.

I'm a music lover, but a bit old-fashioned: I like to listen to entire albums, I'm not very much of a playlistsI like to listen to a complete record production to enjoy a kind of dramaturgy and, on the other hand, many of the tracks that I listen to are not the same. playlists sometimes leave outside is where I discover my favorite of an album. In that sense, it would be very difficult for me to choose which album or which song would be with me all the time because my will is different: to be always searching. Also because I'm eclectic about genres, I don't really like the sectorization that causes music, I prefer to free myself a little bit from that social thing that defines what you listen to, to get into different genres and enjoy, which is something so important to me.

If you ask me right now, I'd take a Frank Zappa record to a desert island, whom I'm rediscovering -although first I'd make sure I have a place to play it-. I'd be very sad to leave out Radiohead, Pink Floyd, or Red Hot Chili Pepper, which has been one of the bands I've most identified with all my life... Today I'd take a Zappa record, which is where I'm at, and tomorrow it would be something else.

Which band would I like to work for? That's super complicated -super-; as I like to discover things and be part of the development of a musician, I would choose a young one rather than an established one, something that is in the making. For example, right now and thanks to AM: PM I made a discovery of these "new delivery guys", like Chezca Zana and all those people, who have motivated me with their association between delivery and punk. I liked that and moved some fiber inside me, the alternativity with which they work, the looseness and all that thing a little "hard", underground... It would probably be a project I'd like to get into. I'd rather do it than do a Pink Floyd cover. It's like this.