If you ever thought the rich tapestry of borderland music needed more industrialized goth sounds, Rio Grande Valley’s Fronterawave has a record for you.
The project’s creator, musician and producer Charlie Vela says the sound of the “Calavera” album is inspired by moments of the macabre in borderland media.
“The ‘Calavera’ record was actually something I started making long before Fronterawave,” Vela said, “I had the idea, this must have been 2014/2016, that I wanted to do some sort of goth/cumbia/electronic thing. Like Nine Inch Nails with the accordion or just sort of getting into the macabre theme.”
Vela also pulled from Mexican classic cinema.
“It’s got a lot of influence of the ’60s Lucha Libre movies where its like ‘El Santo las Momias De Guanajuato’ where they would be in sort of these cartoonishly scary scenarios,” he said. “The music’s very dramatic and scores are very dramatic and the dialogue [is] very heavy and scary and stuff.”
The idea of the region holding many distinct moments and being so multifaceted intrigued Vela.
“I had been learning about the more sort of gruesome historical things that had happened here, like the cult murders of Matamoros, things like this. And I was like ‘Oh, theres these kind of interesting confluence of themes,’” Vela said. “And I had been getting very into cumbia at that time and so I was like it would be really fun to try and mix all this stuff together.”
But after completing a larger portion of the music, Vela set the project aside for a bit until one day in 2022.
“When we were getting into the Halloween season that year I thought ‘maybe I should just pull this out and not obsess so much over it being perfect,'” Vela said.
“Just kind of putting it out to be enjoyed and just sort of standing behind it with the same kind of philosophy that I have about the rest of the music that I put out as Fronterawave. Which is ‘don’t overthink it – just make it and put it out.’ So I thought it’d be fun to put it out for Halloween and Día de Los Muertos that year.”
