We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Carlos Snaider. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Carlos below.
Carlos, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
My forthcoming album is the most meaningful, because it will be my first solo project with my own compositions, production and stories to tell. Most of my professional musical experience in the last 10 years has involved co-leading bands of 4-8 people. I love the collective models of co-creation that have come with that, and am still working with a live band to play the solo-album music at shows, but I knew that at some point I needed to craft a space where I could take complete ownership of my creative process. I’m someone who likes to blur lines between art and life, so a solo-project has allowed me to integrate personal routine, devotional practice, and seemingly quotidian acts, like the food I cook and the ways I move my body, into the creative process. What I’ve discovered, in a curious way, is that although my the process is much more intimate and personal, I am uncovering wider points of access and more pristine encounters through what I share in this current creative phase. So, while the process is individual in its form and structure, the end result remains collective.
Carlos, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m an independent artist. I make music that reflects my interests in the sublime, in interiority, and how the dedication to understanding the self can reveal possibilities for rich and harmonious living in community. I’m interested in exploring such themes in daily life, in the elements, in popular culture, in silence, in movement practice such as Chinese internal martial arts, and most abundantly, in songs, musical performance and music production. Sobriety informs my work. My main instrument is electric guitar, and much of my education as a young person, and some of my lasting communities to this day, come from the traditions of Creative Music and Black American Music, starting with lessons and after school programs like the Colorado Conservatory of Jazz Arts in the Denver area and continuing to a Music Performance degree at Harvard and immersion in the NYC jazz scene. I also sing, play keyboards, Cuatro Puertorriqueño and some percussion, and have recently started rapping and producing on analog synths. My newly publicized artist name “Aquíestoy,”is Spanish for “Iamhere.” I’m the son and grandson of immigrants from Puerto Rico and Ecuador, and while acknowledging that fact, I choose with this name to prioritize the here-and-now, and its vital energies. From that “place” of the present I also explore cultural identity, language, diaspora, errantry and being a wanderer. I’m dedicated to original and creative music, with much indebtedness to my various music teachers throughout my life, most of whom impacted me far beyond my studies of the guitar and music, per se. The rigor in my music is the same rigor that I apply towards my life. My work is both conceptual as well as grounded in vitality of myself and those I collaborate with.
In Seattle, I co-lead the jazz and contemporary songwriting quartet EarthtoneSkytone, as well as the 8-piece salsa ensemble Eléré.
I would say that what sets me apart is that I fully embrace my life while striving to create sound environments where we can be our most connected selves, while celebrating our differences collectively. Also, in addition to making music, I dedicate time towards co-creating artistic and life processes of artisrs and non-artists. I work with clients on personal wellness from the creative perspective that I have researched while learning how to nourish my own life as an independent artist. My clients and I work on listening within and without, embodiment, physical and emotional health, cooking, meditation and other healing protocols. This work adds another dimension to my work that is beyond being on stages.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The goal in my creative journey is first and foremost devotional. The Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara says devotion is “to seek to know, earnestly, one’s true nature.” Some may dismiss this as selfish, which it is, but I challenge them by asserting that the Self is at its core something collective. There is something that connects us all, and I explore it through hyper-specificity. Both can exist.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
Many people might point to my guitar playing, live shows, or my songwriting as reasons for me being an artist, but it is important to knock artistry, as it were, off of its pedestal. My experience of being an artist is having ownership over my life, and working within the creative energies that surround me day-in and day-out. I learned this from my mentor Josefina Báez, a performance artist, poet and philosopher who is dedicated to herself first and foremost, with her performances being small windows into what is otherwise a constant process.
Contact Info:
- Website: carlosregardless,com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carlosregardless/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carlos.snaider.77
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/carlos-snaider
Image Credits
The photo on the red couch: Dana Waldron
First photo with checkered guitar strap: Jim Levitt
Album Artwork: EarthtoneSkytone “Pottery of Valleys and Arches.” Artwork by Kelsey Mines and Carlos Snaider