“Being in an independent band today is in itself an act of resistance.” who speaks is Guillermo Mármol, singer and lyricist of Eterna Inocencia.
With warmth and confidence in teaching, he explains that “Being independent is our only possible format of development and we take it on with joy. It all comes down to a question of expectations generated by the project. If they are very wide, this path can be thorny ”.
The Quilmeña band has been growing for more than 25 years which takes them from the underground world of punk-rock to the status of a cult band, adored by a loyal and ever-growing audience.
The group represents a different picture of the copious punk rock and hardcore scene of the 90s, where many concepts of social and individual struggle began to take shape that today finally have the desired visualization.
At the same time, it is the band of his generation that has best known how to put into practice the balance between the emotional and the combative.
Go to work
This quintet of sensitive suburban warriors who brought nearly 3,000 people to the Obras stadium in 2021they are showing up As soon as the flowers open, their ninth album which sees them pay homage to the post-punk influences they embraced in their pre-teens.
The album includes collaborations by Marina Fages and Buco Cantlon, and comes out on the occasion of the greening of the trees and the birth of many types of flowers, which they have adopted as a metaphor for the post-pandemic.
They were always characterized by having a clear message, brought to fruition and perhaps the explanation for this gift could lie in the fact that Mármol is a history teacher, director of a traditional German school and a member of the Quilmes Historical Studies Board.specializing in research on the German-speaking community of Quilmeña.
The rest of the group also presents itself as an exception to the rule: Germán Rodríguez is a drummer and former professional judokaRoy Ota (guitar) is sound engineer and producerI was Pesquero (guitar and backing vocals) directs the Technical in Musical Creation of the UNQ and also Ale Navajas (bass and choirs). music therapist.
From this explanation emerges fundamental information to understand the phenomenon, in the words of Mármol: “Eternal is not intended as a means of livelihood for anyone.”
The rationality applied to the group’s songbook is always accompanied by that sentimental element – translated into lyrics of intimate stories, family affections, homages to friendship and childhood references, among other things – which makes them a very united band, of great emotional identification with the listener.
“It is the product of a cultural movement”
Do you think you have some sort of mission as a lyricist?
-Here is a conjunction of things: on the one hand what I have is a practice of relief, a catharsis, and on the other you do not want to escape the responsibility that others listen to you and those words have their weight.
What interests me is to start from micro stories, or how more general processes can be explained from a local event. My role on the Quilmes Historical Studies Board has to do with micro-stories, because payment histories allow us to explain other, larger issues.
For example, today I was teaching and we witnessed the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the railway in Quilmes; that it was William Wheelwright – an industrialist who brought the railroad in gratitude for a shipwreck he had had -. The boy was very well received by the people of Quilmes and that is why today in Quilmes square there is a monolith, etc. So from there you can see the industrial revolution and you don’t have to travel from Rivadavia and Irigoyen, in the center of Quilmes.
Returning to the point, you build responsibility for what you want to communicate and it is a luxury to be able to do it. And doing it through the band would tell you it’s the best because if there’s something art doesn’t have and science has, it’s conventions. Art breaks conventions and science has a method that must be respected, so I’m great! (laughs) Because I’m in a place where I manage two worlds and I can capture that subjectivity in an area that would certainly be limited otherwise.
– Thinking about the origins of the band, it can be said that they come from their beginnings linked to fights that are currently very relevant.
-Yes, completely. It is the product of a cultural movement that developed in the second half of the 1990s. There Eterna was one more exponent than the tools she had, she tried to warn.
You have had several issues that today circulate in the social imaginary with much more force, such as the issues of health, nutrition, the extension of rights that were then issues related to an active minority, which is a time band and also a concept of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the European parliamentarian who was important in the France of ’68. There were more bands before us like DAJ or NDI, who were part of that show.
Today all of this is being replicated and not to mention the concept of Do It Yourself which has had a major technological revolution in the middle, right? Think that we have contacted people on the other side of the planet by writing correspondence, as it has been throughout the history of humanity. With the internet we have become protagonists of a change of epoch and we have gone from writing letters to contacting us via Whatsapp.
In between, the creative possibility also gave us access to tools that were previously confined to a small space, in fact we have already recorded several albums in our studio, internalizing Do It Yourself. Today’s platforms allow us to share our records without depending on a record company. The paradigm has become more accommodating to what we did as a rarity 25 years ago, which in historical terms is nothing.
“Eterna contains the idea of its name”
-What analysis do you make of the fact that all these social advances have become visible in recent years and there are also people who take it lightly or as an excuse to confront?
– That’s a great question. I think there is still a lot to do, but unlike those years it seems to me that in order to continue to agree and raise awareness, today the way to share or communicate it must be different. You are saying it very well. Today it is difficult for me to make a song that appeals to a very extremist feeling, very “hands-on”.
I am in a further phase to continue on that reflection and one possible path is to continue trying to dialogue. To approach positions, alternatives. It must be done by trying to generate a cordial environment for exchange, including discussion. Today putting things in terms of comparison bothers me, wears me out … that’s why I have Los Ingobernables! (note: Guillermo’s parallel hardcore band) With Eterna I try to call the meeting point. Establish points of agreement.
-So how would you define the spirit of Eternal Innocence?
-For me Eterna embodies the idea of its name. She has a permanent state of exploration and adventure, but also a certain degree of innocence in terms of progressing the path and what that path may contain. I feel that deep in the soul of the band this sense of investigation is very fresh, of continuing around these aspects that have formed and nourished us; still need to investigate. We have a constant state of innocence about what’s to come, but also a deep desire to navigate it.
For example, today for the first time the band played on national radio, they played the song Your appearance in Mega, 25 years after starting to play.
-As for the emotions that your lyrics evoke and that affect the feelings of the followers, how do you manage to concentrate to sing those songs live and not be dominated by the emotions?
-No, enough … I cried a lot with the songs! When we do the demos and listen to them and evaluate them from many points of view, I cry my eyes. The lyrics appear intermittently, it’s not like I’ve composed the album’s twelve songs into one, so that feeling comes when I write and then the lyrics appear inserted into a song. In those moments I wonder how crazy it will be when we put fourteen songs of one in people… it’s like a liter of tears. It’s terrible. People tell us.
-But live you manage not to break, which attracts attention.
-But it happens to me, huh. In recent years it has happened to me. My voice broke and I kept singing crying, it’s an indescribable feeling. It’s very difficult to explain, I’ve never talked about it … (to think). But it has some redemption. It’s so powerful … and not to mention when there are a lot of people behind you singing the same thing!
-I assume this emotional support from the audience will end up helping you in some way.
It is very strong … There is a song called Daniele, dedicated to a great friend of mine who died on stage while he was playing, who sometimes I can’t finish it. But they are also life-giving emotional costs. They extend my life, there is a greening there. As one of our songs says, “If I don’t play, my pain grows.”
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Source: Clarin
