There’s a part of “Porno” Elsa Yepes doesn’t remember playing. Her brain literally cuts the recording. “My brain faces fear = erases parts of the experience to protect me,” she says.
What’s left when the song ends is a corrosive feeling and the doubt that always shows up with it: am I being understood? Does this work or am I just breaking myself? The next song starts before any of that gets answered. Muscle memory takes over. The cycle keeps going.
It hits different every night, but it hits the same shape. Repetition is the discipline โ slow training in living with fear instead of running from it. “That’s something I’ve learned over time.”
The body keeps a tally. Voice work, exercise, the kind of training you do partly out of love and partly as insurance against the future. “I’m training hard to win this race against time.” The day after a show she’s fine if she keeps moving. The trap is the sofa. “As soon as I touch the sofa I’m gone. At least I know my body โ and that’s the start of many solutions.”
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That kind of physical accounting runs through the whole conversation around “Bruto“, the EP Le Mur put out earlier this year on Spinda Records.
The songs themselves we covered already in the track-by-track. What we didn’t get into then was the rest of it: how the parts got built, how the band negotiates ideas, what it actually felt like in the room.
Take Carlos Barcelรณ, whose RAT pedal ended up running through most of the EP without him quite deciding it would. “At this point I don’t really overthink it. The RAT has kind of become this multi-purpose tool for me that I’m constantly experimenting with.” Funny part is he’s currently not even into it as a distortion tone.
“What doesn’t click with you one day might suddenly make total sense the next one, especially with the kind of music we make. There are no predefined rules about how we’re supposed to sound.”
The “Reuben” trick โ Santi muting the strings by hand โ is one of the only hidden details on the record, as far as Carlos can remember.
“There might be a track somewhere,” he laughs, “I don’t even remember which one, that was recorded string by string.” He admits he’s bad at archiving any of this. “It would’ve been cool to document the three of us recording ‘Ryo’ on video, but I’m still not great at thinking about that stuff in this moment. I prefer to just focus on living it, and I end up forgetting about photos and recordings.”
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The two guest features on “Bruto” came in from completely different directions. Juan A. Soler โ Kantz, of Delobos, Serpiente Oriรณn and Salvaje Soler โ was the easy one. A short conversation about context, then the next message had his parts done. “He is blessed,” Elsa says, “and we are too lucky for having him understanding our shit.”
Mireia Porto of Rosy Finch was the involved one. Both Elsa and Mireia have full-time jobs, the timing was a mess, and the collaboration ended up happening a couple of days before the studio session for “Llaga“.
Elsa describes Mireia as “not just a talented and gifted musician and writer, but a jukebox with legs. Oh my god, her vinyl collection.” She came in with reference points pulled from memory โ Hole, Melvins, Nirvana โ and Elsa already had parts that fit. They tracked the vocals on Mireia’s laptop, then made finishing touches at the studio. The final question/answer section got written on the spot, in the studio’s fishtank room. “It was fun, respectful, stressful and rewarding in all cases.”
That kind of late-stage rearranging is how the band tends to operate. When “Llaga” got cut shorter โ a change made after the song was already deep in their muscle memory โ there was some adjustment.
“Sometimes when you change something in a song we already have really internalized, it can feel a bit strange at first for some of us.” But the band has a rule: any idea from any member gets a proper try. “And what usually happens is that those changes end up staying, because the song just works better that way.”
“Where Are You Going, Paco?” went through a slower version of the same process. The original idea leaned hard on heavier riffs and stayed that way for weeks before Pedro J. Carrillo’s lighter, more atmospheric direction took over. Juan Carlos Becerra remembers it as gradual rather than obvious. The shift gave Elsa more room. “She was no longer confined to something so hard and defined. In the end the result came out better than originally thought. It’s great to see how ideas evolve in this band.”
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They don’t keep a list of sounds they avoid. The electronic pad on “Porno” is almost trap. “A few years ago it would have been very difficult to accommodate something like this,” Juan Carlos says, “but experimentation is something we will always pursue.”
He laughs remembering the closing section of “ADVP”, when Elsa pulled back: “uhhh maybe this is too punk for me.” The broader principle is simple. “It’s like cooking. You play with the ingredients to find your perfect recipe.”
Most of their songs change a lot between rehearsal and final form. Few stay close to where they started. Two extremes from “Caelum Invictus” make the point. “Atalanta” was already in motion before Juan Carlos joined the band. It took two years and went through several phases before it landed. “Epimeteo” came out of a single rehearsal โ structure, shape, finished, in roughly ninety minutes.
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Asked what excites them more right now โ bigger stages or the right kind of crowd โ they don’t pretend the big stages don’t appeal.
“We’re not going to lie. Everyone in the band dreams about getting to a big stage where we can really show what we can do, with good sound and the space to take it further.”
But the actual measure is connection. “Playing in front of people who are actually there for it, who feel it and give something back to you. In the end that can happen in a small room or on a big stage, and when it does, that’s what makes it worth it.”
And the songs don’t stop moving once they leave the studio. They get reshaped to fit alongside the older stuff so the set holds together. Parts get stretched, parts get cut, endings change. Whatever the night needs.
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