Claude S
+ Anything Box
When did you first get into music? That’s a strange set of circumstances. You could say it was when my mom took me to a radio station in Rosario, Argentina, and I sang on the radio. It was some sort of call-in thing, but they liked my 4-year-old attitude, so they asked her to bring me into the station to sing on the air! It was the first time I was ever in front of a microphone. But it gets weirder from there… I was given music lessons when I was about nine and hated all of it. Wanted nothing to do with music. What changed my entire life was an accident on a lake in New Jersey, where I basically drowned! Before I was saved, I had ‘an experience’ with death. For whatever reason, the time I spent unconscious did something to me. I was never quite a child in the normal sense, and music and art became a way of exploring this other world I’d been to.
I hear the men with the straitjackets knocking… Who or What inspired you to pursue a career in music? The what, as I said, was the drowning. After that, every musical thing I could get my hand on I explored. I loved records too. Because I tended to suffer from migraines as a child, listening to music in the dark was a must, and I enjoyed that inner space. For me, it was The Beatles as my best mates, followed by Pink Floyd as I got older, and eventually I discovered electronic music, which blew my mind. I heard the future, and it came from Computer World by Kraftwerk. But I also had the song bug. So I figured out a way to make that mesh with visual art too.
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As for a career in music, it happened really fast. My dad brought home a reel to reel that he won in a card game, and I immediately took to it. Recording became something important to me. By then I had my first synths, a mic and a bass, so it was all set up. That, and I figured out early that my paintings sold better when they were on t-shirts than in a gallery, so I had merch early on by accident! Music made more sense from that point on.
