Introducing: Heatherwood + Trade Winds Recs

So you’ve been running your blog Escucharemos for quite awhile now, is Trade Winds an extension of the blog? What initially inspired the idea?

I started Escucharemos back when I was sixteen, in the coldest part of a Boston winter. I wanted travel and adventure. Most of the music that goes up on the blog was birthed from somewhere quite far away. Many of the artists that I’ve worked with constantly remind me how universal my desires can be. This new Trade Winds project was born out of the same yearning for more, for exploration and beyond. 

I began thinking about creating a label sometime last summer, somewhere in between a mountain peak and a sandy beach. That was the summer before I set off for school. It was my last time at home for a while. I was ready to go beyond, to learn and to live. I wanted to explore some old misty city. I started playing around with different logos and fonts and all that stuff. But then I was at school. After a couple of months, I again wanted something distant. I wanted something distant to be familiar. I let things sit for then. I forgot about the idea.

I spent the month of May living in Havana, Cuba. There I studied Cuban hip-hop and how many Cuban rappers were striving to use music as a medium for social expression and political activism. I met many immensely talented artists there. They were creating the realest music. Even though I didn’t consider hip-hop one of my go-to genres, the emotions I found in Cuban rap were unmistakably beautiful. They are there, hidden in bedrooms across the country— small studios, old computers running bootlegged versions of music production software like Fruity Loops and Reason.  We spent nights talking about all the challenges they faced—and listening to Run-DMC. I knew it was not the closet recording setups or the general lack of resources that hindered their so-called success. In those cramped rooms, with graffitied Cuban flags stretched across peeling walls, there was so much. I realized that much of the music I listen to, and a lot of the music that keeps the internet-based music mill churning, comes from artists working with almost the exact same recording resources. However, my Cuban ‘oh-mees’ were lacking the ability to distribute their music. Explaining the blogosphere to someone that has never used the internet (unless you count a state-run intranet) proved to be almost impossible. Many of these artists, who spent their days rapping about women’s rights and educating many with verses about the island’s dense racial history, were signed to a state-run label/PR agency, La Agencia de Rap Cubano, which only distributes music and promotes within the national market– making it more or less almost impossible for their music to spread outside of Cuba. Some artists try to work outside the system, I think the DVD full videos of duo’s performances, which a waiter slipped to me at alongside the check, probably falls into that category. In most parts of the world, musical distribution has largely inverted. Not so long ago you had to first ‘make it big’ in your hometown before there was any chance that someone in a different country would be bumpin’ your jams. Unless you’re Rodriguez, I suppose. In many ways, the dive bar has been replaced by a soundcloud account. It was during my time in Cuba that I finally understood how much I’d taken all of this for granted. Several young artists have told me recently that they aren’t really thinking about making it ‘big’ and that desire been largely replaced with the satisfaction and encouragement of making it ‘wide’—seeing last.fm scrobbles and bandcamp downloads from dozens of countries. For many young artists, the horizon has become the home front, and the internet the all-important mechanism in this madness.

Trade Winds is about connection. The project is about defying distance. It is about conversations only possible with google translate. It is about doing something so personal that it becomes universal— something your own, in your own space, maybe in your own language, and compressing it to an mp3 and sending it across town, across the pond. The world is shrinking everyday. I want Trade Winds to expand that distant horizon. I want to know everything about the edge of understanding.