Rock My Monkey: Hello, you are listening to the Rock My Monkey netcast on RockMyMonkey.com. Today we are speaking with Chris from the band Ill Nino. How are you doing today, Chris?
Cristian Machado: Good, man. Here in California, just enjoying, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.
Rock My Monkey: Enigma was due, has actually been pushed back several times, but is currently scheduled to be released January 8th of 2008. How come so many delays?
Cristian Machado: I think we just felt like we didn’t want to rush the record, you know? This is our fourth record. Well, four and a half if you count the EP of covers we did. And I think we didn’t want to rush the record, you know? That was the main reason. We had so many songs coming into pre-production. Even the process of figuring out how and where and with who we were going to record the record was a little bit lengthier than everybody would have thought. But I think mostly the reason is the amount of songs we came into pre-production with. It was just a lot of songs. We needed to kind of re-arrange some of the songs, figure out which ones we were going to put on the record, maybe change some parts here and there, get everybody’s material and start blending it together, see what pieces fit into what songs. And even after we picked the songs that were going to be on the record, there was still a lot of work to be done as far as figuring out tones. We really didn’t want to rush it at all. We wanted everything to feel really natural when we recorded the record. And even beyond that, getting the record mixed by Jay Baumgardner,he’s very much in demand. He’s a very needed mixer nowadays, I guess, and he had a lot of projects going through. We were really trying to make the schedule fit as much as possible, but unfortunately it is the music industry, and sometimes some things get delayed. The fans sometimes suffer because of it, and I feel really bad about it. But at the end of the day we really have to try to give them the best material that we can. It is our fourth record, and we wanted to make sure that we just made a very different record. We didn’t want to follow the guidelines of music today. It took a little bit longer to really define what we were going to do. We wanted every song to be completely different from each other, more on this record than any other record. We really just didn’t want to rush it. I guess we could have rushed it. But I’m not sure that the record would have come out so diverse, you know?
Rock My Monkey: So it was mainly waiting for the right people to do the mixing and do the mastering?
Cristian Machado: Yeah. That and just taking a little bit longer in pre-production with the picking of the songs and just rearranging some of the parts. Some songs that we picked to be on the record at first, a couple of weeks later, a month later, got changed for another song. So it was just a work in process. I’d say the two main issues was just trying to get the right people that we definitely wanted to work on the record, and then just us not, getting to a point where we’re not double guessing ourselves, and just continuing with the songs. Once we got to that point it was a smooth flow towards the finishing of the record. But along the way, I mean we were here in L.A. for a while, for a really long time, just knocking out pre-production, going to the studio, getting tones. And Jay as we were finishing the record, Jay would mix a song here. The next week he would mix two songs. He did a great job giving a schedule. We knew that he had a really rough schedule. He had the P.O.D. record, the Foo Fighters record coming through there. He had-what’s that girl that did that did that song with Eminem years ago?-Dido. He had doing the record in there. We were just appreciative that he actually opened up the time that he could to mix the record, and also we tried to rush it without sacrificing, I guess.
Rock My Monkey: The band has promised to release a new track on the eighth day of every month until the album is released on the band’s MySpace page and your official site. What makes this band embrace the technology that everyone else in the industry is so damn paranoid about?
Cristian Machado: Well, the thing is, you know-I guess it could go back to the good old saying, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.’ That’s really the only thing we could say. I mean, the main reason why we are releasing these songs is because we realize that the record’s been delayed for way too long now, and the last thing we want to do is to make our fans upset in any kind of way, or make somebody feel like we’re lazy and just don’t want to put a record out, or the songs aren’t done, or we haven’t been working or something like that. And we are excited about the record, so in return we’d love to make the fans excited in any way that we can. And I think that it’s worked out really well, you know? The fans are really embracing the new songs. Obviously there are going to be some people that loved building on the past that might hate this new record. It is really diverse. There’s a lot of surprises on there. I’m not going to kid anybody. We’re not trying to make like a cookie cutter mold type of record here. We’re really trying to diversify every single line that we can. And I think that through releasing songs little by little, one every month, the fans are starting to see that yes, this is a very different record, and they’re starting to realize that we are trying to pave a different kind of road than we have before. Even thought it is Ill Nino you can hear the songs, you can tell it’s us. We kind of just wanted to give the fans a little taste of the wide variety of styles and flavors on the record little by little. And then perhaps kind of like, to make them excited, and to also show them appreciation for waiting so long.
Rock My Monkey: What do you think Eddie brought to the cd as producer that would not have been there otherwise?
Cristian Machado: Eddie definitely brings-on this record I would say he definitely brought a sense of comfort. Coming into the record he had heard a lot of the songs that we were working on before we went into pre-production, and he seemed to be as excited as we were. He knew that it was some of the coolest material we’ve ever written. He’s a very musical person. He’s very into musicality, different things, originality. As a producer obviously he’s got a really good ear of things that are catchy, and things that might cross over into other styles of music. And I think he brought a sense of comfort. He made us feel comfortable with experimentation of sounds in different kind of songs. He really made us feel like, man, we’re making something special here. There’s no need to rush it. He was always on our side. A lot of producers sometimes when they have deadlines, they’re pressured and pressured and pressured by the higher ups of the label, and they crack under pressure. And eventually that leads to them making the band crack under pressure. And with Eddie it was the other way around. He was really on our side. Didn’t want to rush the record. He didn’t want to over-produce the record, which was a very important thing to us. We wanted to make the most organic record that Ill Nino has ever made. We wanted the sounds to be earthy, to be elemental, not so much electronic. Sure, there’s still those hints of electronic in Enigma, but the feel and the vibe is definitely more organic. And one of the most important things with working with a producer is making sure you work with a producer who understands your vision, is on the same page as you are as far as what the ultimate end result should be, and also a producer that, depending on where the band is at, knows how much to produce the actual record. A producer that knows when to leave something alone because it’s already good, or a producer that knows to suggest a change because something may not be as good as it can be. And Eddie kind of brought that comfort with us on this record. We’ve known him for a really good time. And you know, I’d say that-he’s produced two of our other records besides this one. I’d say that for every record he’s had a different approach to it, depending on where the band was at at the time. And with this record it was no different. I think he did an amazing job, and totally stuck by us. It was a great experience working with him.
Rock My Monkey: You guys are now signed to Cement Shoes Records. Why do you feel that they were the perfect label to bring this band to the next level?
Cristian Machado: Well, I don’t know about perfect label, but they were definitely the right choice for us right at that time. And still, I believe that they were the right choice. We’re a really different kind of band if you really think about it. We can’t really be classified into any particular genre because every time we do, we’ll have another song that completely erases that classification we’ve been put into. So, I’m sorry, what was the question?
Rock My Monkey: I was just asking what was it about Cement Shoes Records that made them the right label?
Cristian Machado: That’s right. I was ranting on how we’re a very hard band to classify. And Cement Shoes is basically a new label, and we felt like perhaps they would understand a little bit better how we need to approach releasing a record from a band like Ill Nino. It’s very different. It’s not something that you can say, okay, this is just a metal head record. You can’t really say that. I mean, yes, it’s a lot of hints of it, but it’s not really just a metal head record, you know? Other things, they understood that we were a Latin band. I think that Roadrunner Records opened up a lot of doors for us, and did a lot of great things for us. I’m not sure exactly that they understood the whole time that we were a Latin band, and we’re really the only Latin hard rock band that exists. Off the top of my head I can’t really think of anybody else. I mean, sure, there’s bands like Maná. I would consider them to be more like Latin alternative rock.
Rock My Monkey: Like who?
Cristian Machado: Maná
Rock My Monkey: I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.
Cristian Machado: It’s actually a huge-see, that’s the thing is there’s a misconception about Latin music in this country. People might think that there isn’t a Latin music scene, but-
Rock My Monkey: Oh, there’s a huge one.
Cristian Machado: But there’s bands like Maná who go to Madison Square Garden and sell it out three nights in a row.
Rock My Monkey: Yeah.
Cristian Machado: There’s bands like that that have broken the seal on the American Latin culture. They’ve broken through. But there really isn’t any bands like us that push the envelope of aggression in hard rock, and that also sway the other way and bring all the beauty of a Latin ballad to the table. Or perhaps just Latin, tribal essences with flamenco guitars or acoustic guitars and then later on come back to some aggression and some strong emotion. So for us I think that we believe and we hope that Cement Shoes definitely understands what we are trying to do. It’s very hard for a label to take in a band like us and be able to have a devised plan of how to go about the release of a record. Because there really is three or four different streets that they could walk down. And I think that the right thing for this band is going to be reaching some type of balance of how a label sees us. We’re not just a metal band. We’re not just a Latin hard rock band. And we’re not a pop band. We’re not a band that really follows any trends or genres. I guess we needed somebody who was starting fresh. And that’s the way we felt. They were starting fresh. They might be able to have a fresh image and fresh vision of what Ill Nino is. And I think that’s what we needed. We definitely didn’t want to go with a label that had thirty other bands and was just going to take us and try to clump us into the closest thing they could relate it to.
Rock My Monkey: I’ve read that the band has already filmed three videos for the cd. Are these videos all connected in a storyline, or was there another reason that they were all filmed at the same time?
Cristian Machado: They weren’t necessarily filmed at the same time. They’re kind of being worked on at the same time. The recording of the record and the pre-production of the record, it’s a work in process with also making the video. We didn’t want to just make any videos. We wanted to have a little bit more influence as far as the storylines would be, and where the emotion of the video is. The first video that we’re going to release is just about done. It should be getting finished maybe in a couple of days. It’ll be “The Alibi of Tyrants”. It was filmed in Germany at a really cool festival that we played. I think it was the last show of our last European tour. It’ll be a live video with some extra studio shots here and there, a lot of audience shots. A very energetic live video pretty much. Then we started shooting a video for “Me Gusta La Soledad” which is our Latin ballad kind of song. It’s got a very cool acoustic guitar. The lyrics are all in Spanish. A lot of emotion behind the song. A lot of cool violins here and there in the background. We wanted to make a totally different video than “(The) Alibi of Tyrants” for that one. We wound up finding this location that actually Dan Couto is associated with, called Citizen Smith. Beautiful, beautiful lounge. It’s got a lot of great colors and candles, and there’s also a storyline that goes with the video. That should be getting edited maybe sometime next week, or the week after that. “The Alibi Of Tyrants” is more the aggressive live video. “Me Gusta La Soledad” will be more the spiritual, very colorful, you know, obscure kind of ballad video. And we will be shooting a video hopefully in the next month or month and a half for our first single, “Pieces Of The Sun”, which will be an American radio single. “Me Gusta La Soledad” will be a Latin radio single.
Rock My Monkey: I notice that your top MySpace friends are set so that it actually spells out the band’s name. Who thought of that, and will there be anything special going on with those MySpace accounts that fans should look out for?
Cristian Machado: Who thought of it? I have no idea, to tell you the truth, man. I am so bad with going online and things like that. I’ll suggest to the band things we can do online to perhaps let the fans have some fun if they’re on their computers and looking for Ill Nino stuff, to make them a little bit more interactive with us, whatever it might be. Whether they can contact us and ask us questions, or whether they can show us their tattoos and we can comment on them, or whether we get pictures of fans and friends and put them up. It’s really just a cool way to make them interact with us, to make them feel like they are close to the band, like we’re not that far away. You might be at the other end of the world, but through the internet we can actually connect. I think really that was the main reason behind it. I’m not sure as to who thought of it, or whose idea it actually was. Like I said, I’m not really that internet savvy kind of dude. I wouldn’t even know how to make a MySpace profile and make it look cool. I have no idea.
Rock My Monkey: One of the things I like to do when I get a band on the phone and I do an interview is I like to squash any rumors that might be floating around about the band. So I have to ask would your band ever use background tapes, or is everything 100% raw when people see live?
Cristian Machado: No, of course, we use some samples live. People can call it whatever they want to call it, to be honest with you, man. But let’s be real here. We’re not just a metal band, and that’s one of the first things that I mentioned. If we were just a metal band, I guess we wouldn’t do things like that, that are more hip hop influenced. If we really think about the idea of sampling a sound that can’t be replicated on a guitar, or sampling a sound that is actually a keyboard sound, and then not having it live, to us it’s not really as cool as it could be. And being that we are so varied in musical taste, man, it’s something that we use to our advantage, the same way we would use anything to our advantage. Whether it’s sampling a sound, whether it’s having an open tune on an acoustic guitar. Stealing a Jimmie Paige idea by tuning all the strings the same and having the tuning of the guitar sound really different, to the point that people can’t really-if you have a guitar, and you have it tuned to a regular 4/40, you’re never going to figure out the chords of the song. So these are just things that we do in order to keep it fresh and different. And I’d say that is has to do with our varied musical tastes. We’re not a rap metal band, we’re not a rap rock band, but there are cool things about hip hop that in the old days were almost like an evolution of music. Sampling happens to be one of them. On our first record we sampled a lot of hip hop beats. A lot. It doesn’t sound hip hop. But the essence is there.
Rock My Monkey: The percussion.
Cristian Machado: That’s what music is about to us, man. We’re not these tunnel vision kind of dudes, you know? We’re always really trying to break the walls of the tunnel and trying to see if there’s a little hole we can peek through. That’s really who we are. So yes, we sample things live. I don’t care what anybody says. If other bands can do it, good for you. I don’t know what to tell you. For every band that doesn’t do it, there’s three bands that do. Some bands, obviously in pop music they take it a little bit out of control, and they play to a tape, where the entire thing is on a tape. We don’t do that. We get knocked down for sampling beats or intros to songs, or segues from song to song. Or perhaps a keyboard part. And it’s like, people that are going to talk down about us doing simple things, like sampling a beat that cannot be played on a normal five piece kit, or sampling a keyboard sound that cannot be replicated on a guitar or a bass or any instrument we have onstage, is really just a way to be honest. It’s like hey, we did this on the record, and here we are playing the song live. We’re a six piece band. Everybody is up here playing live, but we sample some things. Here you go. The segue between the songs. This is intro to “Alibi Of Tyrants”. You know it’s a sample, and then boom, we come into the song and the song begins. So it means a lot of different things that we do. Some people can knock us. I really don’t care. Those people are pretty much, I wouldn’t call it tunnel vision, but very close minded to experimentation in music. And to tell you the truth, the way music is going nowadays, it’s upsetting to see so many bands doing the same thing, man. I mean, just copying each other, not caring about trying different shit. Only do over and over ‘Okay, here’s the scale. Here’s all these different kinds of scales. Let’s put a blues scale here. Let’s put a Middle Eastern scale here. Let’s put a jazz chord here.’ That’s all cool and dandy. Or perhaps time signatures. ‘Let’s go from a four/four to a six/eight. Or let’s go from a six/eight to a five/eight. Or a seven/eight into a three/four.’ But to tell you the truth, that’s not the tip of the iceberg when it comes to writing original music. Time signatures and scales is like fifty percent of the real thing. Sounds and performances and different tones is the other fifty percent. A lot of the bands out now-I mean, there are some bands, don’t get me wrong, that are trying to keep it fresh and original, and that are basically using the same scales and time signatures that every other band uses, but they’re approaching it a very different way. I’m not going to go name bands, because it obviously would make other bands feel if I name them then I’m saying that they’re not original or something. But we all know who those bands are. All you got to do is go buy twenty different records in the hard rock genre nowadays, and put them all, put them all on. Grab the Ill Nino record, throw it into that batch, and it’s probably going to be the more different sounding record than all of them. And that’s not me saying, ‘Oh, god, we’re so different.’ That’s me being realistic and realizing we’re a really different band. Sure, there are some songs that cross over into some other genres, such as metal, or perhaps, just and you see this in hard rock. But you can’t really peg us. Part of sampling and using samples is something else that makes it hard to peg us. Not a lot of bands do it. A lot of bands would rather just experiment with scales and time signatures, and that’s as far as they take it. To tell you the truth, after three hundred bands experimenting with time signatures and scales, what else is there? I guess to a lot of bands there might be nothing, and music will just stay stagnant for the rest of its history.
Rock My Monkey: Now is the time of the interview that I like to call the Lightening Round, where I’m going to name something in popular news or popular culture, and you sum up your thoughts in one short sentence.
Cristian Machado: Okay.
Rock My Monkey: Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Cristian Machado: I haven’t yet to really consider any of the new candidates running at all.
Rock My Monkey: The NBC show Heroes.
Cristian Machado: Cool show. Perhaps a little too fantasy oriented.
Rock My Monkey: The iPhone.
Cristian Machado: Great technology. Too expensive at first.
Rock My Monkey: President Bush.
Cristian Machado: Moron.
Rock My Monkey: Fox News.
Cristian Machado: Fox News. Let me think of a really good one for this one. Fox News. Lies, lies, lies, and double standards.
Rock My Monkey: Recording Industry Association Of America.
Cristian Machado: Let’s do something about music nowadays.
Rock My Monkey: I do have one final question. Every year we choose one final question that we ask every single band from classic rock legends to the most extreme death metal bands at the end of every interview, partially to stump people, but also to see who wimps out and won’t answer. This year I’m asking people to look into their crystal ball and predict what political figure, world leader, musician, celebrity, anybody world wide famous, who do you think might die before the end of the year?
Cristian Machado: Celebrity or musician?
Rock My Monkey: Celebrity, musician, political figure, anybody.
Cristian Machado: That’s a really cool question, man, but it is kind of morbid. You know that you’re asking people to write somebody’s death.
Rock My Monkey: It’s a little dark, yeah.
Cristian Machado: Yeah. But I dig it, I dig it. Let me see. Let me really think about it. Who might die before the end of the year? Wow, man, it’s almost, we’re pretty much like a month away from the end of the year. You know, I can Amy Winehouse having an overdose.
Rock My Monkey: Amy Winehouse Alright.
Cristian Machado: And I love her. Don’t get me wrong. I love her. I think she makes great music. But she loves to party a little too much. It may be her. Who knows?
Rock My Monkey: I thank you very much for doing the interview. Anybody listening to the audio version can go to RockMyMonkey.com for the full featured version with clickable links, readable text, and many more wonderful features. I’m asking people to click on the album cover above and below to pre-order Enigma by Ill Nino. And I do hope to see you guys up on tour in the Northwest sometime soon, maybe at my favorite Seattle club, Studio 7. And thank you very much for your time.
Cristian Machado: Thank you, brother. And we’ll be talking soon, man.
