About 15 years ago, I was looking for commissioned material on the web, for a colleague. That’s how I met a rare but very interesting band called ESQUELETOS.
The search for the material was very complex, there was no clear name, I did not know if the data provided was correct, in order or reliable. Beyond trusting the person who entrusted the task, the website did not return successful results and when it did, they were very confusing.
Time passed until I found a source. The p2p software had a possible positive result. The colleague fed back the anxiety and I became even more obsessed with the challenge of getting what I was looking for, it was no longer a question of whether or not I was “available”, it was already personal, I wanted to hear what I had been asked to do.
A not-so-long wait paid off. The album downloaded, in a very poor acceptable quality mp3 at 192kbps (something unfortunate, but we are in the middle of 2000, the HD did not exist yet, YouTube barely had hosted La Hora Chanante and a handful of horrible videos and the kittens were not a late night nor the stars of the web).
Disk in hand. What caught my attention was the voice of its singer, a mixture of melancholy awaiting with the most striking defeatist spirit of the Iberian Spanish song of the 70s. That mystical voice, it stuck in my sonorous heart to come back again and again, as many times as necessary, to cheer up, to move on or simply to pass the time. To this day.
An album that went from recommendation to recommendation, hand to hand, I admit that I copied, duplicated, traded and traded it as many times as I could.
Kal Cahoone | PH: John Rumley, 2010
Today, Kal Cahoone, that voice as thin as a crystal glass, resides in Denver, Colorado, after having traveled tirelessly to her maternity ward. This did not prevent him from moving away from music, Spanish, poetry.
In 2016, if I remember correctly, I think I found Kal’s fanpage on the Internet, where I began to see her activity and to know a little more about this woman with a voice that attracted my attention and that became a company in solitude and also in many meetings and parties.
In 2018 and 2019 I visited Valparaiso (Chile), I walked its streets, its ports, I listened to the street music and enjoyed its sea and chorrillanas fruits, without realizing it, I walked the same streets following that siren’s voice. With Elena, my friend and friend of many adventures, we almost visited La Sebastiana, the House Museum of the writer Pablo Neruda in Valpo, for some reason that day we changed our plan, I think we went to record the sea in Reñaca.
While I was editing the note to make the montage of the RUIDO #10,, simultaneously I talked with a friend from Santiago, Gerardo Figueroa Rodriguez and told him the journey of Kal with the Spanish and how she arrives in Chile and then passes through Argentina. As a determined fact, in a unique moment in our lives, as is the word, it penetrates you so deeply that it ends up determining the future of your actions.
Such is the case of Kal, who, in high school, as a teenager, a teacher read him a poem by Neruda, in Spanish. Something that for her was the trigger for her tireless search in song and music. In her own words “It changed my life”. With Gerardo, something similar had happened, but with a comic book read, also in her adolescence. Butterflies flap their harmless wings in Siberia and here on the other side of the world, the Zonda doesn’t stop blowing. The conclusion was that as in certain conjunctural moments, we take determinations that “affect” us in ways that will not be reversed, will guide us perpetually in the search for a humanism of things, will feed us in both light and darkness.
In 2020 I leave a message to Kal on his Facebook page indicating my interest in setting up the possibility of an interview. If there are some luxuries that this profession can provide, it is to be able to converse and exchange ideas, words, moments, with those whom one admires first or that one considers worthy of giving a general contribution to the state of things. A blessing received and given to me by this profession, I can assure you, I have never interviewed anyone and left displeased by the encounter, if I have complained about those who do not speak, in short, I am also an old complainer and is part of another story settled.
I received a prompt reply from Kal and to my surprise, I had to draw up a questionnaire and send it off promptly. The chain of emails was instantaneous, I didn’t know that he also spoke Spanish and neither did all his history around the language, I already had an interpreter ready and a dubbing artist prepared. It was not necessary.
And so I got three audios.
Continue in the RUIDO #11