To listen to Cienfuegos is to listen to centuries of history: Context is king here, and for Alex Suárez, the brain and the heart behind Cienfuegos, there is no way to separate the social from the musical. There is the Santería chant of his Miami-Cuban neighborhood, the industrial and noise of his DIY shows, the techno of his nightclubs, and the rattle of the dump trucks driving by. There is the music of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. And there is him, which is, of course, all of that.To try to get a grasp on that history, I caught up with Suárez over plates of arroz, habichuelas, and pollo guisado at a Dominican diner, the closest available substitute for Cuban food in Bushwick. We discussed what it means to have a home, the Cuban Revolution, dance music, violence, and the rhythms in the world around you. Cienfuegos has a new record, A Los Mártires, out on Unknown Precept.NOISEY: Who is Cienfuegos, and where do you come from?
Alex Suárez: Miami, Florida by way of Cuba by way of Spain by way of a bunch of other places. A nomadic person. Don’t have a home.Never had a home?
No, never will. That's just the nature of how these things go. Everything's so transient. Everything changes. You don't have a home you just have a place you can call a community for some time and then you have to move. That's been the experience of my family, the people that I come from, the culture of it for multiple generations now. My great-grandparents I think were born in Cuba. My grandparents were definitely born in Cuba. My parents were born in Cuba but they left for the United States. Me and my sister were the first people in my family to be born in the United States.Did you listen to music with your family?
My father got me into a lot of American music more so than Hispanic music. My grandparents exposed me to Hispanic music a lot more. And just living in Miami I got exposed to that. My mom showed me jazz, doo-wop, soul music, early Motown recordings, a lot of Hi Records and Stax stuff. She really loved disco. To this day I still spin disco records that belonged to her. But my grandparents exposed me to a lot of what I know about Cuban music and Latin American music in general. My grandfather was a funny dude. Construction guy, hard-working dude, loved to drink, loved sad songs. There were parades in Hialeah where I'm from where santeros would come out and do rumbas, and they would play drums and have ritualistic ceremonies. That was a huge thing.What do you think about Santería?
I think it’s beautiful. As with everything, there's a mix of people who take it on for other reasons than religious or spiritual, but for those people who take it on for religious and spiritual reasons, it's beautiful. You get to see people involved in an ancient ritual, musically and spiritually. There's dance involved, which is really important culturally. Instrumentation-wise, it's a lot of congas, batá drums, clave, güiro. The vocals don't necessarily line up exactly with the rhythm, but there are harmonies, and everybody knows common ones, and they sing them together, and people dance in the center, and they have spiritual experiences based off of that. It's a lot like blues, where there are certain common things that are happening in blues with the lyrics, and they just repeat, and they're developed through people improvising or through dance.Why did you name this project Cienfuegos?
Aside from some family coming from there [the town in Cuba], it's a beautiful sounding name and literally translates to "one hundred fires." And it's also the name of a very important revolutionary general from the Cuban revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos.The baddest of them all.
You know that, you were in Cuba, hell yeah. That was the people's person. That was the face of it within Cuba. He truly was a peasant. He didn't come from money, he came from anarcho Spanish farmers and had beautiful ideas about agrarian reform. He was in many ways the driving force behind that revolution, but he died. His plane disappeared over Cuba, and it's shrouded in mystery as to what happened to him. For some reason that energy of that type of a person, a dynamic person, and his disappearance, and the way it sounds itself, is something that just appealed to me. As I keep getting more and more involved with making shit under that name, I get a deeper understanding of why I named it that.So how does this whole—musically, culturally, and politically—affect your music and sound now?
I think it's 100% a product of that Cuban upbringing, the understanding of politics that I have because of my parents. They're literally refugees; they were granted political asylum. Rhythmically, all my music is influenced by Latin American rhythms. Most of my lyrics are in Spanish. Politically speaking, I obviously lean more towards the left, and a lot of the record I just did is more geared towards how to assimilate into industrial or modern society when you have no home or no foundation in that way. My music is an ode to that family, to the people, to the culture. To those who basically gave their lives or lost their home for political ideologies that failed them. It's about floating. It's about being nomadic even if it means you're philosophically nomadic more than physically. A strange thing that happens is if I were to go back to Cuba today, those Cubans wouldn't see me as Cuban, but when I moved to Boston from Miami, those Americans didn't see me as American. You always kind of don't belong wherever you are.I get this overarching feeling of violence when I listen to this new record. Do you feel that too?
I could see it for sure, and I've definitely felt it at times. Certain songs are way more violent than others. I don't mean it as an overtly aggressive violence, but more as a meditation on violence. And not just violence like man-on-man violence, but the violence of this neighborhood and the gentrification that happens, the fact that this place that we're eating at probably won't be here in two years. That's a form of violence. The passive aggressive statements that people say to each other. All these things. But it's meditations on that. Also, I've listened to a lot of industrial music, the hip-hop that's come out of Miami bass… It's very aggressive, some would say violent. So things seep in.I don't think you’re advocating violence, because I know what you're about, but I feel like I can hear that you have seen and experienced some type of violence. And that comes out.
Yeah, definitively. Certain parts of Miami where I grew up around are very violent. Generally I was in a working class neighborhood that didn't see crazy amounts of violence, but I have seen violence. I definitely got my ass kicked a bunch of times. I definitely kicked some ass a bunch of times. I find in my head in certain ways I'm a violent person who has had to learn to exist without that, and use it as a form of energy but to never act on it in a destructive way. I have some historical stuff with my family: My uncle has been in prison for 25 years for living a violent and somewhat crazy lifestyle, and that has always been something that my mom was afraid of when I was growing up. So she never let me go 100% shithead, or lose my way, because she had a brother in jail. I definitely have had to chill. Violence is going to be around you no matter what. You just have to learn to exist within it.Do you want to tell me about the texture of this record?
A lot of it, funny enough, is recorded on the iPhone. Samples of things in the neighborhood. Around where we're at right now is a more Hispanic area that's definitely in transition to a more hip Brooklyn neighborhood, but where we live further down the block is above this factory and across the street from a waste plant and all sorts of other food processing things. So there's constantly noises happening. And they end up being rhythmic and work with each other if you know how to listen to them. There's a bunch of that happening in there. Those noises seep in a whole bunch. I'm warping those sounds and using textures. A sound of metal hitting another piece of metal on the side of a building. A flag pole scraping the wiring on it. Dumpsters being dragged. Wheels rolling. Those things just seep in and play a part. They also vaguely remind me of Jai Alai, it's a factory town in certain parts and I spent a lot of times in those areas. I get lost listening to that whenever I'm in my head too much. I try to just listen to those things as a meditative process. You inevitably find how connected everything is and how much music there is in everything in that way. A lot of the sounds come from that. A lot of them are processed from that.
I wouldn't say a "community" as much as a close knit group of friends that I have that are excellent people that make amazing music across a couple of genres. I have friends that make techno, industrial, noise, punk. And by virtue of going to their shows and hanging out with them and letting them show me music and showing them stuff, it seeps in, and you start to understand things about yourself because of the music that you listen to. Greater communities exist, and it's fun to exist and float between all of them and not really belong to any of them. And it's done things that I really like for my music.Do you like to dance?
I love to dance. Dancing is beautiful, it's the way that I get out so much stress and anxiety. I even dance during my sets at this point. I'm feeling it in a very visceral way. It's one of the most important parts of me. I don't necessarily like dance music that's made with the intention of being dance music, but music that you can dance to that has a greater message or purpose is really appealing to me. Physically moving your body is meditative and tantric and sexual and violent, it can be so many things. It's human language without all the shortcomings.Reed Dunlea is getting lit like a bonfire.
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Alex Suárez: Miami, Florida by way of Cuba by way of Spain by way of a bunch of other places. A nomadic person. Don’t have a home.Never had a home?
No, never will. That's just the nature of how these things go. Everything's so transient. Everything changes. You don't have a home you just have a place you can call a community for some time and then you have to move. That's been the experience of my family, the people that I come from, the culture of it for multiple generations now. My great-grandparents I think were born in Cuba. My grandparents were definitely born in Cuba. My parents were born in Cuba but they left for the United States. Me and my sister were the first people in my family to be born in the United States.Did you listen to music with your family?
My father got me into a lot of American music more so than Hispanic music. My grandparents exposed me to Hispanic music a lot more. And just living in Miami I got exposed to that. My mom showed me jazz, doo-wop, soul music, early Motown recordings, a lot of Hi Records and Stax stuff. She really loved disco. To this day I still spin disco records that belonged to her. But my grandparents exposed me to a lot of what I know about Cuban music and Latin American music in general. My grandfather was a funny dude. Construction guy, hard-working dude, loved to drink, loved sad songs. There were parades in Hialeah where I'm from where santeros would come out and do rumbas, and they would play drums and have ritualistic ceremonies. That was a huge thing.
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I think it’s beautiful. As with everything, there's a mix of people who take it on for other reasons than religious or spiritual, but for those people who take it on for religious and spiritual reasons, it's beautiful. You get to see people involved in an ancient ritual, musically and spiritually. There's dance involved, which is really important culturally. Instrumentation-wise, it's a lot of congas, batá drums, clave, güiro. The vocals don't necessarily line up exactly with the rhythm, but there are harmonies, and everybody knows common ones, and they sing them together, and people dance in the center, and they have spiritual experiences based off of that. It's a lot like blues, where there are certain common things that are happening in blues with the lyrics, and they just repeat, and they're developed through people improvising or through dance.Why did you name this project Cienfuegos?
Aside from some family coming from there [the town in Cuba], it's a beautiful sounding name and literally translates to "one hundred fires." And it's also the name of a very important revolutionary general from the Cuban revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos.The baddest of them all.
You know that, you were in Cuba, hell yeah. That was the people's person. That was the face of it within Cuba. He truly was a peasant. He didn't come from money, he came from anarcho Spanish farmers and had beautiful ideas about agrarian reform. He was in many ways the driving force behind that revolution, but he died. His plane disappeared over Cuba, and it's shrouded in mystery as to what happened to him. For some reason that energy of that type of a person, a dynamic person, and his disappearance, and the way it sounds itself, is something that just appealed to me. As I keep getting more and more involved with making shit under that name, I get a deeper understanding of why I named it that.
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I think it's 100% a product of that Cuban upbringing, the understanding of politics that I have because of my parents. They're literally refugees; they were granted political asylum. Rhythmically, all my music is influenced by Latin American rhythms. Most of my lyrics are in Spanish. Politically speaking, I obviously lean more towards the left, and a lot of the record I just did is more geared towards how to assimilate into industrial or modern society when you have no home or no foundation in that way. My music is an ode to that family, to the people, to the culture. To those who basically gave their lives or lost their home for political ideologies that failed them. It's about floating. It's about being nomadic even if it means you're philosophically nomadic more than physically. A strange thing that happens is if I were to go back to Cuba today, those Cubans wouldn't see me as Cuban, but when I moved to Boston from Miami, those Americans didn't see me as American. You always kind of don't belong wherever you are.I get this overarching feeling of violence when I listen to this new record. Do you feel that too?
I could see it for sure, and I've definitely felt it at times. Certain songs are way more violent than others. I don't mean it as an overtly aggressive violence, but more as a meditation on violence. And not just violence like man-on-man violence, but the violence of this neighborhood and the gentrification that happens, the fact that this place that we're eating at probably won't be here in two years. That's a form of violence. The passive aggressive statements that people say to each other. All these things. But it's meditations on that. Also, I've listened to a lot of industrial music, the hip-hop that's come out of Miami bass… It's very aggressive, some would say violent. So things seep in.
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Yeah, definitively. Certain parts of Miami where I grew up around are very violent. Generally I was in a working class neighborhood that didn't see crazy amounts of violence, but I have seen violence. I definitely got my ass kicked a bunch of times. I definitely kicked some ass a bunch of times. I find in my head in certain ways I'm a violent person who has had to learn to exist without that, and use it as a form of energy but to never act on it in a destructive way. I have some historical stuff with my family: My uncle has been in prison for 25 years for living a violent and somewhat crazy lifestyle, and that has always been something that my mom was afraid of when I was growing up. So she never let me go 100% shithead, or lose my way, because she had a brother in jail. I definitely have had to chill. Violence is going to be around you no matter what. You just have to learn to exist within it.Do you want to tell me about the texture of this record?
A lot of it, funny enough, is recorded on the iPhone. Samples of things in the neighborhood. Around where we're at right now is a more Hispanic area that's definitely in transition to a more hip Brooklyn neighborhood, but where we live further down the block is above this factory and across the street from a waste plant and all sorts of other food processing things. So there's constantly noises happening. And they end up being rhythmic and work with each other if you know how to listen to them. There's a bunch of that happening in there. Those noises seep in a whole bunch. I'm warping those sounds and using textures. A sound of metal hitting another piece of metal on the side of a building. A flag pole scraping the wiring on it. Dumpsters being dragged. Wheels rolling. Those things just seep in and play a part. They also vaguely remind me of Jai Alai, it's a factory town in certain parts and I spent a lot of times in those areas. I get lost listening to that whenever I'm in my head too much. I try to just listen to those things as a meditative process. You inevitably find how connected everything is and how much music there is in everything in that way. A lot of the sounds come from that. A lot of them are processed from that.
What sort of community are you a part of that helped this record come to life?
I wouldn't say a "community" as much as a close knit group of friends that I have that are excellent people that make amazing music across a couple of genres. I have friends that make techno, industrial, noise, punk. And by virtue of going to their shows and hanging out with them and letting them show me music and showing them stuff, it seeps in, and you start to understand things about yourself because of the music that you listen to. Greater communities exist, and it's fun to exist and float between all of them and not really belong to any of them. And it's done things that I really like for my music.Do you like to dance?
I love to dance. Dancing is beautiful, it's the way that I get out so much stress and anxiety. I even dance during my sets at this point. I'm feeling it in a very visceral way. It's one of the most important parts of me. I don't necessarily like dance music that's made with the intention of being dance music, but music that you can dance to that has a greater message or purpose is really appealing to me. Physically moving your body is meditative and tantric and sexual and violent, it can be so many things. It's human language without all the shortcomings.Reed Dunlea is getting lit like a bonfire.