Growing up in the punk scene of the Rio Grande Valley, it wasn’t surprising that Charlie Vela wound up working with audio for a living. But it wasn’t until the lead-up to the pandemic that he went all in on a new hobby.
“I was kind of getting into my midlife crisis: Man, I’m going to collect keyboards and synthesizers,” he said. “You know, some people go cars, some people go records, some people go synthesizers.”
Over the years he also collected regional conjunto albums.
“Lots of 45s from labels like Falcón and Bego and Ideal, all these kind of like regional conjunto Tejano labels that were like, all defunct now,” he said. “And these 45s are kind of like the main thing that exists as a memory that they ever were around.”
Then one day it clicked.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to see if these could be the source material for a sample-based project?”
Vela recounts the influences of hip-hop sampling decades-old records from within African American communities.
“What could you do if you were doing the same thing for music that was based around the accordion or the bajo sexto and lyrics that were in Spanish?” he said. “What shape would that take, if that’s all you really gave yourself to work with?”
That’s the basis for his Fronterawave project.
“A Fronterawave track is sort of like a fuzzy, dreamy, nostalgic version of accordions and keyboards,” he says. “And sort of like lyrics in Spanish with influence of like 90s hip-hop and sort of like the New York boom bap-style hip-hop and also sort of more recent lo-fi music. Slow and dreamy and full of delays and feeling like it was recorded off an old VHS tape.”
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One feeling he says is interesting trying to capture musically is the undulating heat.
“It’s like when you see the heat rising off in the distance and you see it sort of distorting,” he said. “It actually reminds me of TV shows in the 90s when they do a dream sequence: The edges of the screen are wavy and they put a color around it.”
Another musical touchstone is “The Johnny Canales Show.” You can hear the catchphrase “You got it, take it away! Eso!” in a handful of tracks from Fronterawave.
“That was like a thing that I associated with fuzzy TV as a kid. You watch that on Sunday mornings and he’s your avuncular, tío – sort of the way I remember that is the vibe of the music,” he said.
Vela has released about 50 songs available to stream on music services like Spotify. The latest is an album released in July called “Sabor Eterno” along with collaborator, writer and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Leal. It’s an ambient electronic musical score written for a “multisensory dining experience” titled “Sabor Sin Fronteras.” The sci-fi dinner series was conceived by James Beard Awards semifinalist Joseph Gomez of Con Todo in Austin.
“It incorporates sound textures sampled and synthesized from natural elements like corn husks and kernels,” Velas says, “as well as interviews and monologues of people who grow the ingredients that make our food possible.”
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