The Cult of De Juepuchas

Text: Camila Álvarez.   Photos Courtesy of De Juepuchas

An increasing number of Colombian musical artists are mining the country’s rich and somewhat undiscovered cultural depths; Jack correspondent Camila Álvarez recently sat down with De Juepuchas, one of the best examples of this movement.

Close your eyes and you’ll hear fragments of popular ads and TV shows sewn together with controversial political speeches and children’s songs across modern colorful beats. Open your eyes and you’ll see confetti, balloons, and dancing bananas. There’s carnival paraphernalia and cotton candy, people dancing around like wild euphoric kids. Enjoy the moment. Be yourself.

Welcome to the “Nanay Cucas Experience”, a playground constructed by Scott Anderson and George Nenon. Here memories come alive and remind us that we are part of this weird event we call human life. Anderson and Nenon are pseudonyms for the Bogota-based duo De Juepuchas, who are toying with national artifacts of sound and culture to craft new compositions in a fun, fascinating way.

Jack: What inspired you to create a soundtrack using Colombian auditory memories?

De Juepuchas: It wasn’t premeditated. I had the opportunity to take a class that makes you more sensitive to the sound experience in general, to listen to the world in a different way. After that I started collecting sounds. I wanted to make covers of songs and I realized I could put together all the stuff that I had been collecting in my new creations. Coincidentally, they ended up being a reflection of my own reality: they were all memories. They became De Juepuchas’ 1st album.

J: Your music creates an atmosphere that takes us back to childhood, inviting us to play. Why?

DJ: Kids have a more innocent view of life and they are predisposed to say “yes” to things, to smile at things, to have more fun. When we grow up we start forgetting that and we start believing in certain things about the world: paradigms – how we have to dance, how we have to eat, how we can laugh at sad news, etc. Childhood is a beautiful thing, and that’s why we try evoking it in our live shows.

J: You guys played at SXSW in Texas this year. How was that experience?

DJ: Very challenging – we were playing next to all these emerging acts in the independent scene. It’s not so much a festival, more like a market. Like when you go to Wal-Mart and you are in front of 800 kinds of milk: whole, low-fat, lactose-free. So, to stand above everyone else is a challenge. We did well, but we know there are still a lot of things we can do better. I see it as a little step we took going up a huge stairway.

J: Tell us a little bit about your side projects.

DJ: I see them as personalities. There are some behaviors that change, some words we say differently when we hang out with different people. And that also happens to my musical mind. One project is called Matiz y Semblanza – these are songs that I composed with friends. We used to go to Andres Silva’s studio (a former member of De Juepuchas) and stay there until dawn making music. Then there’s Interlude, more of a personal and experimental project.

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J: You’ve said before that there’s no such thing as “pure originality”, that everything stems from pre-existing ideas. So what defines originality?

DJ: Intention – the wish to alter somehow a pre-conceived idea, which then results in this idea being impregnated with your soul.

J: We know you’re behind ‘Recrea’, a collective that formed in an effort to fight ‘La Ley Lleras’, a new law that would place restrictions on what we share online and how we do it…

DJ: I believe the Internet has the power to challenge paradigms about knowledge, learning, creativity, and how we solve problems. The internet is like De Juepuchas’ mom, and I have to defend it. For more info you can visit www.recrea.co.

J: Your first album, ‘Ser De Juepuchas Varios Años’, was such an original idea. How do you follow that up, do you continue along the path it paved, or do you look to forge a new one?

DJ: To keep using the same idea would be like obeying an expectation, and I don’t want that. Ideas have to evolve, and they do so when you keep being curious and looking for new things. More than receiving a pat on the back, I want to generate questions with my music.

J: Have you ever thought about translating the De Juepuchas Experience? Maybe play with auditory memories from other places?

DJ: Lately, some people have told me that they would love for me to translate the experience. It happened with someone from Australia, with a chick in Italy, and with people from different cities in Colombia. I just spoke to this girl from Naples who has a team of people that have been collecting sounds that I’m going to translate to music. If it works, this can definitely be the beginning of a global project.