In 2011, a friend and I formed Basement Tracks. A band that eventually became a laboratory where I could develop my posters, painting, photography, and audiovisual practices with music videos. In the beginning, I started by creating projections for live performances. Later, the graphic art of the posters and album covers became my main means of expression. Basement Tracks is an art-rock project (heavily inspired by Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground), not just music. Researching in this intersection between visual arts, music, and fashion, I began to test my creations in different languages, overlapping them. Within Basement, besides the posters, album covers, and singles, I made the logos (initially, we were The Basement Tracks), merchandise, took behind-the-scenes photos of recording sessions and stills from the music videos, helped direct promo photo shoots, took and appeared in photos simultaneously (using a timer), hand-painted CDs (by far the worst of the five of us), was one of the art directors of the first video: Ocean’s Son, wrote lyrics, and created amazing bass lines.
Listen: Basement Tracks no Spotify
Ocean’s Son: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9WWaxxMCwA&ab_channel=BasementTracks
FOR OUR FIRST SINGLE, OCEAN’S SON, WE RECORDED A SERIES OF CDS AND HAND-PAINTED THEM ONE BY ONE. WE MADE THE CD’S AVAILABLE IN A SPECIAL GIG AT MAQUINARIA TO RELEASE THE SINGLE. IT WAS FREE. THERE ARE ALSO A MUSIC VIDEO, IN WICH I WAS ONE OF THE ART DIRECTORS. Watch it!
The cover of our first EP: Songs From the Orange remains one of my favorite jobs to this day. I used microscope photos from my girlfriend, a biology student. The name is a reference to the colors of the walls in the room where we used to rehearsed at the time, at our guitarist’s house. Since then, there have been two albums and five singles.
