[ʝuˈtub] / the tyranny of image in music-making

How do we relate to images in sound creation? 

Although it may seem unlikely, the digital platform with the highest number of reproductions in musical content today is still YouTube: a platform for audiovisual content in which sound is necessarily accompanied by a video or an image. 

Album covers, logos, video clips, graphic identities, live visuals, RRSS posts: Instagram reels, Spotify banners, TikTok clips... Image accompanies and complements musical discourses, increasingly taking centre stage. 

In this image-driven era, where digitalisation and the Internet have brought about an immediacy of disseminating and consuming content never seen before, we’ll be talking to Galician music creators Anxela (Bala), Nuno (Grande Amore) and Berto (Verto) about the relevance of visual language in their musical output.

Anxela Baltar

Anxela has a degree in Political Science, but for over a decade she has been very much involved in the cultural industry, especially in music, where she works behind the scenes in different communication and production tasks, but also as founder, composer and musician in the rock band Bala. Bala emerged in 2013, when Anxela and Violeta Mosquera got together to play with the sole purpose of having a good time and making a lot of noise. With this project they travelled to places like Australia, Japan, USA, Colombia and several European countries. After Human Flesh (Matapadre, 2015) and Lume (Matapadre, 2017) came Maleza in 2021 with Century Media. This last album was a very important leap in the band's career, and they are already working on new songs for 2023. Anxela is also, since 2019, a member of the board of directors of the MIM Association (Women in the Music Industry), which works for the equality and visibility of women in this industry.

Nuno Pico

"If anyone reading this knows me, it's probably because of my music. I mean, statistically, it's more likely that someone will recognise me for being the guy who sings in Oh! Ayatollah and Grande Amore than for my brief film career, which consists of: 1) being the protagonist of a fake advertising spot I made with some friends of mine for our Spanish Language class in 4th ESO and 2) also being the protagonist of a (?) documentary (?) sketch (?) about cinema in Compostela, made in 2018, when I was in my sophomore year at CAV, and in which you can see me with an afro hairdo, a floral shirt and a painted moustache. So, why am I taking part in a roundtable discussion at Curtocircuito then? I don't know, but I'm very grateful. I feel honoured because I've always loved cinema so much".

Berto

Berto is a singer-songwriter, guitarist and music producer born in Pontevedra (Spain), graduated in Medicine at USC, and trained in classical guitar at the Euterpe school. He started making music in 2019 with his band Verto, which called it quits in 2021 and is now going solo under his own name, Berto. Currently he is also a music producer and has worked with artists like Hijas de Cassandra, Nia Twee or Maiko Leinad, among others.

Roundtable discussion moderated by Acacia Ojea:

A classically trained musician, Acacia Ojea (Vigo, 1994) graduated in Fine Arts in 2017. She started working in the cultural sector in cities such as Marseille (France) and Porto (Portugal) in the field of live arts and cinema and then settled in Madrid, where she completed her postgraduate studies in Contemporary Audiovisual Creation and later in Electroacoustic Composition and New Media. While still finding time for her djing project, where she explores experimental electronics and deconstructed music, her artistic research focuses on sound studies, filmic language, and semiotic networks.