What are your names and roles within jus Kno’?
We are Alex Aller and Pablo Villanueva. Alex takes care of the music and Pablo is in charge of all the visual content.
We are living in Madrid right now.
In our case, the most important thing is that we have finally released our new album “Looped Circles”. This project was developed during the quarantine and it is something that you can tell all along the record because it is our deepest, personal and introspective music till date.
We have been working on the album since Christmas of 2019. During the quarantine of 2020, Madrid was heavily restricted and we spent many months isolated at home. We are flatmates so we passed through the same experience together. By the end of 2020 we realized that all the music that we were making during that time had a connection, the songs were talking to each other somehow. That is why we decided to put them all together in our first album.
The music was our way to escape from this painful situation we are all suffering. In a way, we would prefer that the inspirations of our first album would have come from travel, gathering with other artists or more joyful experiences. However, we think that this album is going to become very special for being our saviour in this historic time, which is a beautiful thing.
We have our own studio at home, where we write, produce and mix all our songs. When it comes to master, all of our records are taken care of by Carlos Koschitzky.
We work with Ableton and we try to stay analog as much as we can by using vintage mixers and also tape processing.
The challenge is always to decide when a song is ready. This is our first album, so there were a lot of discards and changes, also the mixing process became very frustrating since we were stuck at home and refreshing the ears was a bit difficult. The most rewarding moment was when we finally put it out and received all the messages from people loving it.
So for recording we work mainly in Ableton, processing the mix by the Teac 2A and the Teac A3440, especially when we want more texture in some parts. Regarding the instruments, we have an upright piano, a Rhodes piano, guitars and some synthesizers as the Prophet 8 or Juno 106. We only use samples when it comes to drums, for the rest we prefer to write music by using these instruments so we can reproduce almost everything on a live show.
We had already planned and signed to release an album with Faneca Music, but we did not know that this was going to be the scenario. We are happy with the result, although the best thing of an album is sometimes to tour with it and this is something that seems to be kind of impossible right now.
We are planning to keep delivering visual content, with visualizers or more music videos. Also, we would love to do a presentation of the album and put on a good show. We are currently working on it.
The new albums from Grandbrothers, Floating Points and Maria Arnal.
Climbing, movies and traveling.
Hopefully, the return of live events!
We love the food from Asturias, one of the reasons this region is famous for. Our favorite place here in Madrid could be “Matadero Madrid”. It is an abandoned slaughterhouse used now for cultural events.
