On a String and a Prayer

"Y’know, believe it or not today here in Ixtapa, it’s kind of Irish weather. It’s raining. It’s weird – it reminds me of my Irish days.”

Rodrigo Sánchez is savouring a brief break from the road and reflecting on the circumstances that caused he and his partner Gabriela Quintero to return to Mexico after years of exile in Ireland. The fruit of that retreat is the duo’s third studio album 11:11, a marshaling of raw fire and technical virtuosity that braids their traditional turbo Flamenco magic with metallic flash and subtler textures derived from jazz and world music.
“The idea of recording at home was to get away from the pressure of the label,” Rodrigo explains. “We live pretty much right on the beach. We built the studio specifically for the recording of this album, away from everything, and you’re totally unaware of what’s happening out there.”
After initial sessions with John Leckie, the veteran producer who also oversaw their international eponymous debut, the pair professed themselves unsatisfied with the direction of the recordings, scrapped the tapes and decided to produce the album themselves with the help of metal guru mix-master Colin Richardson (Slipknot, Funeral For A Friend, Napalm Death). The latter’s involvement was, Rodrigo says, a means of reconnecting with their Tierra Ácida-era thrash roots.
“John Leckie came here and we worked on several tracks and we didn’t like it, it was sounding the way the first album was sounding, and we had different ideas,” he says. “But to be honest, when he went back to England, I was like, ‘Fuck man, am I gonna be able to really see what I want here?’ I knew what my sound was and what I wanted it to be, but I didn’t know if it was the right sound for Colin to work with. I had to approach the whole thing as if I was in my metal band, and I didn’t want Colin to change the way he works to work with an acoustic project. I asked him to keep the same techniques, and I was going to deliver the tracks the way he would normally get from a metal band: very clean, separated and crystal clear, in order for him to get into the whole vibe of mixing it.
“Colin was the guy I wanted to work with back in the days when I had my metal band,” Rodrigo continues. “In the 90s he was starting to become well-known among the metallers because he introduced a very clean sound to bands like Carcass. I wasn’t a fan of Carcass, but their first album with him was completely different. And then Machine Head and all these real metalheads. And recently I was listening to new bands like Trivium, and regardless of the music, the recording was amazing.”
And what was Richardson’s reaction to Rod y Gab’s material?
“He was delighted, he wanted to change the mood of his everyday job. When we came up with the first track once Leckie had left, he was like, ‘Yes, now I can work with this fuckin’ music. It’s clean and clear.’ He has a very complex way of working. When you are in a metal band you’ve gotta be very precise. I know we are not a metal band, but we come from there. We had to do this track by track, being very aware of the tempo and the metronome, very precise, and it’s more difficult but it helps you as a musician to improve your skill. The trick is to keep the soul going on and not to sound too technical.”
Such standards of playing, Rodrigo maintains, demand almost athletic levels of discipline and physical maintenance.
“We need to practice every day,” he admits. “When we’re on tour, even if we’re not performing that night, we have study time in our rooms so we can nail it. It’s like a football player, you gotta be totally fit for the tour. Personally I couldn’t stop playing the guitar for more than a week or ten days. Nowadays we are not as young as we used to be, so you think about getting better in terms of what you eat and how you rest. Five years ago we used to drink every night, and now I know that I can’t do that anymore, I have to be like some fuckin’... lady. Gabriela’s the same. Even the whole crew... We run into crews and they’re still doing it, hard, and you can see it. So you have to keep your health okay in order to avoid all these injuries and crazy shit that can happen.”
Most artists who are compelled to pay tribute to the musicians that inspired them simply record a covers album. With 11:11 Rod y Gab took it one step further, composing pieces in homage to Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Paco de Lucia and Pink Floyd, plus an elegy for the late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, featuring ex-Testament maestro Alex Skolnick. So where did they draw the line between tipping the hat and slipping into pastiche?
“That’s a good question. We’ve been influenced by all of these guys somehow, and we didn’t want to disrespect this inspiration in any way. We were trying to portray the respect we feel for them without trying to sound like them. For example, on the track we did for Dimebag Darrell we used a little bit of the Oud. I was in Egypt three years ago and bought one and liked the music and decided to use those Middle Eastern sounds on the album. I don’t pretend to tell people I play the Oud or the ukulele, which I do as well on the album, but it’s just to put some different dynamics and colours to the actual sound. Funnily enough, the album’s just been out a month, but we’ve been offered work on two films already in America, which didn’t happen before.”
What was the atmosphere in the studio like when Alex Skolnick showed up?
“It was awesome. We had this whole thing going on with Alex before, because we met him a few times in New York. He came for two days because he was in the middle of some recordings he was doing in Miami. The day we recorded the track, he was totally into the idea of doing it for Dimebag Darrell, who he’d met a few times and thought was a super sweet guy. So I told him what we wanted for the solo, we wanted to have a little bit of Dimebag’s signature, but we wanted as well to have the Alex Skolnick influence clear, so we reminded him of some of the solos we loved from the Testament days. And he couldn’t remember them, so we were playing old Testament albums and going, ‘You know that fuckin’ lick you got? Just take some of it, and some of this.’ We have a video of it, sometime we’re gonna release it on YouTube or something cos it was a great experience.”