That summer of… Álvaro Rivas: in which my band recorded an album | Culture

In Carlos Elías’s room there is a bed, a desk, stacked preamplifiers and a screen. A built-in wardrobe, a bedside table and a corkboard with a Viudas patch on it. Shutters closed, always recording in the dark. Until a carpenter fixes it, no light will come in without the noise from Malasaña coming in. In the centre of the room, amongst his stuff, Carlos sets up a microphone that calls for silence and therefore excludes any fan. Half-naked in his cave, hot, he looks like Gollum and not Gandalf, despite his long grey wig. He smells like a siesta. He has consultations from eight to three as a family doctor. Then, after a can of fabada, he looks for the cot. From there my bell rings him at around six in the evening.

So and there I spend my afternoons for two months. Recording my band’s album without any available musicians or being any of those things myself. With just the right amount of spirit. It’s summer 2023 and we no longer get together with Alma, Conrado or Jacobo. Some leave us stranded, others we throw out. Laura, the keyboard player that we show in our photos, has not yet joined the group. Juampi, the guitarist, is getting a doctorate in Sweden. The Admin, bassist, He runs away from himself and from us shortly after the night of San Juan, and runs to Chorco to meet the wolf. Admin, look! There goes the one in a tunic and a sledgehammer, looking for friends. Admin is even more frightened by such a presence and heals far from Carlos’s room. That summer nobody called Pablo Admin. That summer there was another Pablo in the group. And Barbosa, our battery, He listens to our album Cementar and says that the child is not his even though he looks like him. Everyone bows their heads and shares sorry and I love you. It is not a good time for Alcalá Norte.

Carlos will tell me what to do today. Yesterday we left the session prematurely. Doctor Rock detects the most intimate ailments in the gut by the vibration of the vocal cords. Then he encourages you to stop, because he doesn’t want to waste time. It’s the difficult empathy of genius. Tomorrow more and, the day after tomorrow, even more. We are recording an album because Carlos is determined. There is no one else who believes in all this, except a stranger who offers to pay for the recording of the album in exchange for keeping it. We say yes, of course, of course, because the guy scares us and we have a deadline, and because if he ripped us off that would mean that the album was cool, which is what we ultimately want. So I start working with Carlos, who knows how to play the bass and guitar excellently to make rock. I also go to Pedro, our old bass player, the creator of hundreds of melodies that now only Carlos can record. My message: I need you. He, suspicious: what do you want? Nah, talk about the album xd. He gives me an audience at Tetuán and I talk about it in person. Pedro Buisán also comes to Carlos’s room.

In the Doctor’s room we recorded a thousand takes of each song. He then chooses the relevant fragments for the final version. He has electronically replicated the hits that Barbosa gives in the rehearsal room and is able to imagine how our heavy their drums on the new fragments that we are inventing. Because the songs arrive in Carlos’ room in an advanced state, but few are presented as a finished creation. And what about the Admin, already in August? As Carlos puts his claw into the great unfinished work of the Admin, Elf Street, This comes down from the mountains like teleri who sees a noldor steal his boat. And Carlos’s room becomes, for one afternoon, a port of Eldamar at war, and our most beautiful song finally unfolds its full form. Four fifths of the album, the album that the stranger will keep as his property if nobody does anything about it, are recorded in Carlos’s room, and Alcalá Norte pays zero euros for it. The Doctor does this with many other ragged musicians, who sometimes leave him stranded. It is an outcome that he accepts as natural. A minority completes the work, and then these artists only want to move on to the second phase: going to Carlos’s studio, where hours cost money, there are many more expensive gadgets and his partner Pablo Fergus works, who knows how to do whatever you ask him to with his synths and his mixes and his three masters. There the work that comes from Carlos’s room is touched up; there is air conditioning and then Barbosa has a good time.

And from the La Cafetera studio comes an album debut and we sent the strange buyer packing. Instead we joined forces with some Basques, with José Gerpe and with Camu. And I celebrated by eating at Mangal II with María Victoria on successive visits to Great Britain. I got into debt with the Treasury and spent hundreds of euros that the gang had in their coffers on private luxuries. Problems for that autumn.