Cime

Honduran-American writer and multi-instrumentalist, Monty Cime is one of the most cultured and politically conscious personality of the American underground. With the support of his ensemble, she is giving voice to a "fusion without sacrifice", a particularly intense hybrid of many genres: Latin American nueva canción, avant-prog, tropicanibalismo, avant-garde jazz, emo, neo-psychedelia, post-hardcore, screamo and no-wave. Fascinated by the strength and the passion and her music, we had a long chat with her.

So, first of all, can you tell us what your musical background is and if, before Cime, you played in other bands?
I grew up somewhat classically trained, playing in middle school & high school string orchestras for half a decade, and in college I majored in ethnomusicology. Before Cime, I formed a garage/post-punk band in high school with my friends Yui and Rowan (who wrote a good chunk of this record and did all of the arrangements, he also contributed some answers as well, which I’ve notated when necessary) called Costco Boyfriend, which lasted from 2019-2021. In that span of time, we put out one self-titled EP. Before that, I had been producing solo music which varied wildly in style and quality under the name “Syzygy,” a name I picked in fifth grade, from 2017-2019—my early high school years. Besides that, I played bass in a local church worship band for two years in middle and high school.

are your main musical and non-musical influences?
Musical: Ruben Blades, Café Tacvba, Carlos & Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy, Black Eyes, Victor Jara,Corea, Stravinsky, Arco Iris, Meridian Brothers, Astor Piazzolla,The Brave Little Abacus, Charlie Haden, Peter Brotzmann.
Insofar as broader styles: Afro-Latin jazz, nueva canción Latinoamericana, sass, emo, and post-hardcore.
Non-Musical:Guillermo Anderson (admittedly, also musical, but also just so much more), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hegel, Oscar Romero, Derrida, Fluxus, Mark Fisher.
I can’t speak on behalf of everyone else, though, but this is what I take in with me as a writer and director of Cime.

Does your music have a political value?
Monty: All music has political value, even throughthe wholesale rejection of the premise. To be more articulate, art is a toil, and the act of toiling itself is a political process. I am a communist first and foremost. Not everyone in the band is, but most of them are some shade of far left.
Rowan: The music has no political value.

Can you explain the title of your first album, "The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment"?
Right, so that was a title I had floating around in my mind for years up to that point. The record uses the pretext of major events in Central American history as a means of reflecting of my own life over the past year up to that point, drawing a thick web of connections between recurring figures or conflicts in Central American history with real-world events in my own life and to current Central American geopolitics. Beneath all of this is a story of self-actualization which sees myself coming to grips with my identity as a trans woman in real time while also being far, far too scared to ever say any of these things in a manner that could even resemble being forthright. The “Independence” is referring both to the literal sociopolitical dependency of Central America on the imposing United States as well as an independence from, functionally, my old self, killed in one battle of many which define the ongoing process of transition.

What has changed, even on a human level, from "The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment" to the new album, "The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble"?
Well, I’ve undergone a social transition and I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for, as the time of writing this, 15 months and two days. I don’t feel like my own personal expression has to be hidden between lines or beneath metaphors. I couldn’t have dreamed of being so bold as to put a slur on the title of the first song on a record of mine two years ago. But that’s just one part of it. During the time I spent writing and recording The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble, I was homeless—and this ultimately reflects on the music. This was not meant to be our follow-up to our debut, but it just ended up coming out of me. I’d also broken up with the person who you could, even at your most conservative, call the muse of the project, guiding it into what it had become far preceding its inception. I don’t think calling it a break up album is fair, but I do know I had to contend with this new social reality of having to prove myself capable. Interestingly enough, though, this was also the case for The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment, it’s just that instead of breaking up with a partner, I had broken up with my old band. I’d also learned a lot, both in terms of gaining new influence and direction as well as experience as a performer, from the time I spent in the scene which took up much more of my time after the release of my debut. I felt like I had to prove to the scene that I was capable and that my approach wasn’t fundamentally flawed. I wanted to prove I was better than the people who thought little of the band. There was this thing that happened late last year, which was sort of a low point in my life considering I had just gotten out of the aforementioned relationship, and I consider it something of an inciting incident. I do not hold this against this person, we are friends, but they’d just started a new solo project and would regularly ask to play shows with us. But they pretty quickly gathered attention and were on pace to outgrow us. And so I remember us talking about the possibility of us doing another show together, as we had regularly been doing up to that point, and they said they wanted their next show to be “screamo.” Paired with the way they said it, as though I were just barely too short to go on a rollercoaster ride, it felt like a punch in the gut even if I knew they meant nothing by it. The group also obviously grew from a solo project to a band of like 9 people. I reconciled my differences with my former bandmates, who joined Cime, with Rowan writing and arranging a good chunk of this record alongside help from Sean and Riley. I feel like a very different person with a different outlook on the world and that absolutely reflects in the music, homelessness or otherwise! We also worked with friends I made after the release of the debut, Akira and Alma, to produce The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble, and I got myself into a lot of debt to record it in a proper studio to monumental results. It’s hard to remember two years of my life, let alone condense it into a question, but it was a period defined by a tortured sort of growth. Having to fight to be born, to grow, and so on. Not just musically, of course, but as a person as well. And as you might imagine my taste changed a lot in that span of time. Like I said before, I took so much from the scene because I felt like it would be dishonest to call myself a folk musician and not engage with and transform the sounds which surrounded me. And I saw a lot of similarities between specific aspects of nueva canción and emo. Sometimes the intentions were identical but the approach was different, and sometimes they did things the exact same at a compositional level. And it was very exciting to play with these new ideas.

How did you meet the various musicians you play with?
Monty: There are three major categories which exist to explain the connections I have made to the musicians who play with me: school, mutual connections, and my local music scene. Some of them, I met in high school or middle school. Others were introduced to me via mutual friends of ours. And lastly, others yet found me spontaneously through my presence in our local music scene.
Rowan: Mention Costco Boyfriend on the terms of how we met, and Sleeping Policemen on the terms of Sean and Riley.
Monty: Ok, so, like I said before, Rowan and I met in high school and started out in Costco Boyfriend, our high school band. After our band ended, Rowan and Yui started up a new band, Sleeping Policemen, which had Sean and Riley—when we began communicating once more after I had plugged away at Cime for a few years, Sean and Riley became integrated into Cime alongside Rowan and Yui. Joe and I had known each other through mutual internet spaces for years, similar story with Yaretzi. Austin & Anderson reached out wanting to join the band at the suggestion of a mutual friend, and Jonas found my band on Instagram through Joe’s photography page (he is also a band photographer).

The longest song on your latest album is "The North", which has very long lyrics. Can you summarize its meaning?
Monty: “The North” is an exercise in maximalist performance paired with quintessentially “Cime” songwriting in composition. I’m a big fan of dividing works into three different lyrical approaches—intrapersonal, interpersonal, and societal; introspective, reflective, and a call to action. “The North” (in Spanish: “El Norte”) as it literally exists is a common term in Latin America to refer to the United States. But the term itself and the way it is used in context to describe a romanticized United States ends up taking on a quality akin to Hyperborea. “The North” is split into three sections—a dynamic, noisy intro, a quiet, ambient outro, and, in-between, a densely-orchestrated anti-epic. However, the three-way sectioning continues into the “main” section of the song. Beginning with a typical narrative of on-foot migration due to economic precarity, a setup based on the brilliant Honduran (in fact, he is from La Ceiba, the city of my family’s origin) songwriter Guillermo Anderson’s “Chago (Santiago),” the protagonist is met with increasing levels of violence the further he travels from home, such as being mugged for all of his belongings, witnessing raped and dismembered children who travelled alone, and evading increasingly persistent police patrols. Already a major departure from Guillermo’s song, the divergence of the narrative comes to a head at the climax—where Guillermo’s Santiago becomes disillusioned with the life he’s found himself in the United States and returns home, soldiers of “The North” shoot the protagonist where he stands, leaving him to die floating among others in the Rio Grande at the border only after he’s made the excruciating three week, 500 mile (800 kilometer) journey which left him a dead man walking with a broken ankle.
After the protagonist’s death, the song shifts perspective to how the deeply neoliberal United States anachronistically relies on mass migration as a source of cheap, undocumented (see: expendable) labor to power its domestic economy, and, to this end, pursues the destabilization and economic (if not total cultural)dependency of Central America while also punishing those who flee by choosing a policy of ineffective& consciously violent deterrents (see: making the journey to cross the southern border more dangerous as well as militarizing the border & criminalizing immigration—but only selectively for certain types of immigrants, as White Europeans face comparatively less scrutiny—which is widely known to do nothing to curb rates of migration) instead of meaningful & comprehensive systemic reform. In going from a reflective, interpersonal narrative to a societal call to action, the protagonist becomes more than a victim. Even if his story specifically is fictional, the truth of his role is caustic for martyrdom. As this section unfolds, however, the narrative’s attention shifts, at first a passing glance, and then a prolonged glare, from solely the federal government to the citizens whose consent for this prolonged policy of terrorism has evolved from manufactured to majoritarian as well. Early on, combative observations are vague, applying equally (or, at the self-selecting discretion of the listener, specifically) to either one of the aforementioned groups, such as pointing out the hypocrisy of those calling for violent (whether institutional or unsanctioned) action against mass migration, a position taken up by government officials and citizens alike, while, as previously mentioned, the United States’ necessity for a large, expendable, and cheap workforce has resulted in them forcefully keeping Central America down politically, economically, and culturally to encourage mass undocumented immigration—or, as the song states, “Call for blood, yet decry the flow / When the Rivers of the North run South.” This changing perspective continues in subsequent lines which integrate and challenge common talking points among a growing conspiratorially-minded subsect of the American populous, observing how their supposed interest in humanitarian concerns (see: child human trafficking), especially when it becomes their basis for being anti-immigration,is farcical and willfully ignorant to the ongoing reality of actual childabuse (see: just last year, as one example, there was a bombshell report about Central American migrant children as young as 13 working in American slaughterhouses) happening in this nation (“Talk human traffick one more time / Talk saving kids one more time / As they work your 9-5s”); the narrative coalesces once more. But in revisiting what was once ambiguous, the didactic characters of scorn become one holistic critique, renewed, and, more importantly—distinctly human. Already coming into view with the use of “your” in the line “As they work your 9-5s,” and in contrast to the absolution of death and subsequent instrumental passage obfuscating what would otherwise be an incredibly sudden and jarring narrative shift, the tail-end of this section serves as a bridge to the forthcoming intrapersonal & reflective third-branch third-act.
While deeply emotional in content and performance, the actually-written lyricism up to this point has been, even at its most confrontational, tenably neutral. But the transition to the last vocal-led section of this track sees a complete destruction of these rhetorical walls. From direct, second-person accusations that “America” would never meaningfully curb the flow of immigration due to the overwhelming economic incentive (“Raze them all, more will come / There’s too much to gain / You can never dam this stream”) to wholeheartedly expressing a desirefor reactionary postulations of mass migration leading to societal ruin to come to fruition (“Let the following be known / I hope you do get overrun / And I hope it does collapse / To pan de coco and the carnivals you fear so much”) the persona dutifully balanced throughout the song all-but disintegrates in a few lines worth of text. To what end? Well, the North has been, throughout the song, many things—it’s the destination for the first part’s protagonist, while also what kills him. In the second part, the North is both the federal government’s economic interests and its manufactured consent for cruelty. Choosing to play an increasingly virile and confrontational role as representative of a deeply reflective interpretation speaks to my character as a product of the North of the first and second parts—I am the bastard child of the North. While virtually the entire record was written while I was homeless, I think this last section, more than any other part of the record, is only truly understood with this in mind. And it’s not just because I explicitly state I wish I wasn’t homeless in one line, but because, up to this point, I had been so thoroughly alienated by a world I did not want a part in and now found myself expected, as a musician, to not only make meaning from it, but to compel an audience to care about it. I weep for lost lives and lost deaths alike; even my only comfort, an outburst—art, and the outburst within—is subject to an audience of people I did not choose, each one self-selectinghow much to “care” about what happened to me based on any number of criteria going into the record: if they “agree” with what I am stating, if the performances are “compelling,” if the songwriting is “dynamic,” or if the production is “interesting.” Will I eat or will I starve? Group consensus decides, and I wait for reception endlessly. I will die by bureaucracy.
A reoccurring, increasingly authoritative declaration of submission (“But I guess that’s what I get”) succeeds what seemed to me to be the only logical step forward in perspective, penultimate in text yet light years in distance separated from the closing reflection, which is to speak directly to the audience, stepping beyond the distance afforded by pre-recorded audio. At my most vulgar, I tell you to kill yourself. I say I hope you kill yourself and I want to know you’ll suffer through it. I say that I want you to feel bad and to kill yourself because of it. And I say I hope you kill yourself if you are capable of supporting yourself financially. I think this last line catches people off-guard. Ultimately, it is reflective of how I am not in control of the situation—you are. And this is a piece of exposition which is twisting in its resolution found in the subsequent line, where my death as an artist, in contrast to your suicide as a listener, is as empty with regret as my life was empty with fulfillment (or money, for that matter). Foretelling my own life, even when implying another lost future where art itself becomes more meaningful through intention—another lost connection which never was—and accepting the one I have. Regardless if it is read as genuine and enthusiastic or sardonically and indignant, I never had a choice in the matter anyway. I didn’t want any of it, and I certainly didn’t want to hear a response. You are free to stop listening and never pick it up again. I am not. But I guess that’s what I get.

Tell me something about the other tracks on the album...
“A Tranny’s Appeal to Heaven”‘s writing was spurred by the murder of Nex Benedict and it was the first song I wrote while homeless. It was originally written for an ill-fated side project centered on the idea of creating low-fidelity early-20^th century gospel-blues with an emo slant. I wrote it a lot slower, but as I played it faster, it went from being a blues song to more distinctly Brazilian—an interesting parallel to the actual development of the style. It continued to expand in scope over the course of a few weeks, the growth of the track as it progresses matching the progression of musical trends throughout the 20^th century. Going from blues or bossa to 60s-70s nueva canción/Mexican ballads into a more contemporary post-punk/krautrock jam at the end of the track, with the vocals changing sporadically to follow this constantly changing development. I took a lot from Harmonium for this one.
“The Ballad of Tim Ballard” is the earliest track written for the album, and the only track which I had written before homelessness. I was inspired by Guillermo Anderson’s songwriting, especially with how it expands in a live setting and I took particular note of the vocal limitations afforded to him. In particular, the songs “EstosMarineros (Barco Centroamericano)” and “PorEsaNegra” were something of a blueprint. I also wanted to expand on the harmonic palette of those songs, and I took a lot of inspiration from Bartok, Scriabin, and Strauss to that end. The switch to the jazz palette was all Rowan, and I know he was inspired by Eddie Palmieri and SeruGiran (as was I). It’s a song with a lot of subtext. It’s very theatrical, but as a piece of satire I think that it only elevates it. I also think that when people first listen, they feel like it’s maybe the most extraneous track of the bunch. But I think that by the end of the record, the purpose it serves makes much more sense as a necessary transition and splash of ice-cold water to the face in going from the opener to the rest of the record. I love making records which challenge people. I know at least a few people listened to the first song, thought it was incredible and that they were about to listen to one of the greatest records of the decade, and had their hopes dashed upon reaching the second track. I think that’s wonderful! This is my record. I will steer it in the direction I want to. It feels very empowering to wrest control away from the listener.
“DIYUSA” was initially conceived as a festeja-lando-no wave hybrid. Essentially, it was much more Peruvian or Chilean in its inception. With time, though, it became more distinctly Honduran through the changing percussive styles. I was inspired by the loose vocals of Michael Gira and the tight post-minimalist jam approach of Glenn Branca, Swans, and the archival compilation record Fiesta, Que Viva La. Lyrically, I wanted to write something which felt typically tropical in rhythmic cadence. A lot of traditional songs of the Caribbean and Pacific coast have these dark undercurrents, and I think that saying I was being “subversive” is slightly ahistorical. But in my time in the scene I’d become increasingly cynical of the ways in which success seemed to be funneled into certain sounds and certain bands. So it’s a song about that, very observational and off-the-cuff. The cumbia break was both a way for me to integrate cumbia into the record, and that part, which is the only part in English, was based on a particular instance of drama I had with a band in my scene. The song is funny. I’ve thought a lot about the idea of a comedy-horror analogue in music. I think there are elements of this throughout this record, little lyrical moments that make you do a double-take in context. “The North” has a few of these. “The Ballad of Tim Ballard” is absolutely an exploration of this idea as well, but I think that one is more explicitly funny than it is scary. I guess the topic is a little more scary insofar as it is more consequential, but I feel like that’s because I didn’t want to give them that power of the narrative.
“Lempira (Or, The Lencan Crusade)” came about from an observation I made between the similarities between the musical dialects of tango and emo/screamo/skramz music. Since the scene in my immediate area is dominated by emo and hardcore styles, I felt like I had to both pay tribute to, and facilitate the growth of, “contemporary folklore” as I have discussed in the last set of answers. In particular, I found myself drawn to the structure and performance of Crochet, an exemplary band out of Las Vegas.
“The North” – while I’ve spoken extensively about it, I think I still want to make one more little point. I just said that “The Ballad of Tim Ballard” is the earliest track written for the record, and while this is true, the concept for “The North” – a first-person documentation of migration amidst the indifference of the average American – predates Cime entirely. It was one of the final songs written with my previous band, Costco Boyfriend, around early 2021. That version of the song was decidedly more jangle pop, and lyrically focused on the hypocrisy of those advocating for “sustainability” through veganism while also supporting industries which rely upon migrant labor as well as making fun of the ways in which people are willing to splurge on what I felt were silly novelties for their pets—such as non-alcoholic or CBD gummies for cats and dogs—and contrasting them against the meagre earnings of domestic or farm labor. I think it was a little juvenile and not as thematically tight as I was hoping, which is why when I revived the concept for this record (with contributions from the members of Costco Boyfriend—Rowan really made the track into what it is today. You can find the old version out there on the internet, but it’s just a demo.
“Goodnight From La Ceiba” – I’ve also spoken extensively about this one, but I should also say that we didn’t just slap the sampled source into the finished product. Akira and Alma layered some ambient field recordings recorded throughout the duration of their stay in California to produce the record—fireworks from a Fourth of July celebration and the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. I also passed the original track through a filter to make it sound even older than it originally was, a metaphor for perception or something like that? Maybe now is the point to just let the actions speak for themselves. The content in relation to the greater narrative is there. I’m sure you can find it.

Why did you decide to close the album with "Goodnight From La Ceiba"? By the way, can you tell us what its lyrics say?
A lot of the record focuses on fusion, but I think people take fusion as a rhetorical challenge—what is the weirdest combination of things I can think of? And then they do it. It’s for this reason I don’t personally adhere to the label. Fusion is a framework for me; I think there is so much commonality in seemingly disparate musical traditions, it’s just about being able to pick them in ways which are thoughtful and in service of a greater musical purpose. With that said, there was a decent amount of discussion in the band about the purpose of “Goodnight from La Ceiba.” Some wanted us to turn it from what you currently hear into an actual song, re-recorded but virtually the same, complete with new chanted vocals and a new set of lyrics. The sample was extremely important for a few reasons. First, sampling IS fusion. Fusion is more than just composition, fusion is context. Some wanted to make it a part of “The North,” but I felt as though it was as powerful a statement as any other track on the record—letting it be absorbed into “The North” implies that it is a track not on the same level of the rest of the album. And while I had other reasons for objecting to that which I want to explore in a minute, I do think that recontextualization and sampling in of themselves are extremely important compositional tools.The sample is taken from a 1950s Smithsonian Folkways archival recording titled The Black Caribs of Honduras and is given the unceremonious title “Punta,” which is not a title—it is the name of the dance. Attributed to “Unspecified,” I felt as though this represented the absolute nadir of the academic approach to music—depersonalized and decontextualized, but not in an interesting way—simply stripped of all meaning and all emotion which was once an ontological force of the music. In re-recording the track, all of this sentiment is lost—“The North” is about building meaning and identity out of the metaphorical cracks in the concrete; “Goodnight From La Ceiba” is properly documenting the germination process of the seeds which now sprout into thorny, beautiful roses. Splitting the line between fusion and tradition, academic and popular, and, as Rowan once remarked when arguing we should re-record it, “sampling and ripping off.” The original text is as follows, in Garifuna:

Nuruhumaariheihabuidumeninamafarulubadena
Lamisehuarinugunetiliveuaiuaicameasagare
Naumalulenolabruhabalubauadubiregunielunlasagerone
ArensebabiludoBerona

Which translates to:

sit down, see the enjoyment. it won't kill me
misery reaches the sky, the flowers, and the trees
my brothers will fall and the crows will come
prepare your mourning, Berona [name of a woman]

For the record, though, I didn’t know what the lyrics were let alone what they represented until after the record was completed.

In your latest album, I also hear echoes of Frank Zappa, Zeuhl, Zolo, Avant-Prog, no-wave, etc. Are these artists and genres that you like or is it just a coincidence?
In some ways, I think I stumbled into making avant-prog while Rowan was more proactive about it. We listened to a lot of Soft Machine ahead of writing the record, and in the lead-up to the recording sessions I finally got into John Zorn & Naked City. But no wave was definitely a direct source of inspiration to me; I felt like the connections between no wave and Latin folksong were right there to explore! As for zolo, I’m only slightly familiar. I love what I’ve heard, Rowan got me into Cardiacs, but it would be silly of me to claim I’m very familiar. As for Zeuhl and Zappa (at least beyond surface level Zappa), I admittedly have a lot to learn.
Rowan: Yes, I love Zeuhl! I was listening to a lot of Magma,Soft Machine, La Maquina de HacerPajaros (as well as other Charly Garcia projects), This Heat, and James Chance when writing.

Let's delve deeper into this connection between your music and no wave...
So, I think no wave represents an incisive bridge between the academic and vulgar (which is to say, “popular”) worlds. The methodology is decisively 20^th century Western classical (post-minimalist) in origin, but its attributes in a vacuum are wholly folkloric—the prominence of the hemiola, repetition, tribal drumming, limited harmonic and melodic palette, abstract and stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and so on… these are all representative of Latin American folklore. Compositional techniques “pioneered” by people like Steve Reich or Phillip Glass were already being used in Latin American and African styles of music. The only distinction is that one had the institutional authority of academia on its side to affirm its legitimacy.The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble both conceptually and in its name illustrates my commitment to further blurring these boundaries, ultimately drawing from both while still in service of a popular-oriented framework. This is music to dance to, and treating it like music performed a concert hall is, to me, disrespectful.

What do the covers of the two albums depict?
The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment is a leather-bound novel with a profile portrait of me looking at the viewer, nervously, maybe seeking validation, modeled after a famous lithograph after the Central American political hero Francisco Morazan, who, against intense political opposition during his life, advocated—to the point of staging a war—the necessity of maintaining a federal union of Central American states so as to safeguard political stability against foreign adversaries, whether that be colonial powers or otherwise. Ultimately, it is meant to further ideas which I’d previously outlined regarding my life and experience being a microcosm and reflection of Central American history itself, suggesting me as a successor to the spirit of Morazan and of Honduras (if not Central America).
The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble prominently features apainting titled The Burning of the Inn (La Quema del Meson) by the artist Enrique Echandi, which depicts the Second Battle of Rivas, the major turning point in the Filibuster War which saw US-backed mercenaries attempting to take over the region of Central America to turn into a slave state. He declares himself dictator of Nicaragua after the national bourgeoisie essentially lets him, and Costa Rica declares war on Walker’s army. Walker then stages an invasion of Rivas, is forced to retreat, and then attempts a second invasion—hence why it is the Second Battle of Rivas—to greater success.They’d secured an inn in the middle of the city, with soldierspinning down the opposing Costa Rican army from their defensive position, when a sickly drummer boy named Juan Santamaria suggests he runs a torch to the inn to set it ablaze, which ends up working, forcing Walker’s army to retreat from a highly advantageous position. This act was perhaps the most consequential turning point in the war, and following this battle’s Costa Rican victory, other Central American countries joined the war effort, allying with Costa Rica.
Juan Santamaria is among the most venerated of national heroes in Costa Rica, they have a holiday commemorating his passing, they named their international airport after him, there are several statues of him (always with the torch), and they even named the largest historical museum (where this painting is held) after him. The National Campaign, also known as the Filibuster War, is considered a second war of independence of sorts in Central America. It’s a big deal. So it’s no wonder that Enrique Echandi, who was on the up-and-up at the time as a major figure in the first truly “domestic” national school at the turn of the 20^th century, would choose to take on the subject matter ahead of the opening of the nation's first national art institute/national theatre.However, its unveiling is met with rapturous vitriol from the audience. Their martyr wasn’t romanticized in his sacrifice, painted with the clothes of a peasant which cling to a thin frame of skin and bones. Weak at the knees, suggesting submission, surrounded by other unglamorous dead soldiers, and most upsetting, portrayed as a mulatto with curly hair. While the immediate response was bad, with someone commenting it should be burned from the place where it was hung (which I thought was funny), the long-term effects were even worse: his work was excluded from the national art institute, and his reputation never fully recovered within his lifetime.
I identify strongly with both Juan Santamaria and Enrique Echandi, I identify strongly with both the painting’s events and the real-world reaction to it. In a way, and it’s funny you ask about both records, it’s part of an ongoing dialogue with my previous work. In The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment, there is a recurring symbol—the filibusters—which represents antagonistic foreign interests as well as the members of Costco Boyfriend with whom I had a falling out which caused that project to dissolve in a fairly unamicable and explosive manner. But now they’re not just playing with me, they’re writing all over the record! The inn’s on fire and I’ve just been shot. I’ve seen the public’s disgusted response to conveying my truth. And I’m doubling down.
Of course, the painting isn’t the only aspect to the cover, though—there’s also a significant amount of black, a background which I feel rhetorically takes on the weight of the painting. What I mean is that if the cover was “just” the painting, or if was larger on the cover, it reduces the complexity of the relationship to the record, suggesting that the painting is just an album cover, a visual companion to the music, two unmarried halves making up the whole of the package which is titled and sold as “The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble.” But in allowing for this space, recontextualized and yet preserved in exactly the same manner as I discussed when talking about “Goodnight From La Ceiba,” I make the case that the painting IS the record.

The timbre of your voice is very particular and goes from subdued tones to visceral explosions. Do you have any role models in particular, any singers who have inspired you?
Thank you! I think I’ll always look to Cap’n Jazz as a base frame of reference for their boyish, unwieldly (and even unsightly—which I love) sing-screaming, but I’m just as drawn to the delicately controlled affectations of children’s music vocalists such as Maria Elena Walsh as well as the raw sound of untrained folk singers such as Elizabeth Cotten, the Two Gospel Keys, or the continually re-appearing Guillermo Anderson. Insofar as spoken word (or poetry) goes, I tend to think of it in two planes of existence—the first plane is closer to Maria Elena Walsh, whereas the second is somewhere in-between the buoyancy in feeling of Eva Ayllon and the melodic subtlety of William Bennett.

How would you define your music?
I hate being the one to speak on behalf of my own work because I feel like ego gets in the way of meaningful discussion more often than not, but my intention for Cime is to build off of the legacy and framework defined by nueva canción Latinoamericana with the musical developments which have since come about since its inception in the 70s or that I otherwise feel contribute to furthering the principles of the medium—punk, no wave, industrial, noise (and noise rock), emo, you get the idea.

In terms of themes covered, what has changed with "The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble" compared to your first album?
I don’t think I’m as tied down to the pretext of historical connections or comprehensively attempting to build off of previous movements for validations… Those connections exist for those looking whether or not we’re pulling our hair out trying to make sense of them; on this note, I also sought to expand beyond my categorically limited top-down approach of album-writing where everything has to, in real-time, make sense within the context of each other on any number of levels I’ve set out for myself. But all of that is just conceptual theming, that’s just one part of it. Extended metaphor was such a powerful and empowering literary tool for me, but so too is directness. I started going to local shows much more often after the release of my first record, and while I intellectually understood the concept of beauty and efficaciousness in simplicity, especially as it pertained to nueva canción, emo changed everything for me. I also just have a lot more confidence as to not have to bury the things I want to say about myself, too. There were a lot of rules about not talking about things that were too “modern,” or even discussing them in a way that felt too modern. I thought it just dated them immediately, and in some ways I still do, I also get that you can use modern phenomena in service of a larger statement or as whiplash. People talk about that Billie Eilish style line on the BC,NR record. I never listened to it, but I think that the strong reaction speaks to its effectiveness.You don’t write a line like that without a sense of humor about it. Being funny is cool. I could not have written “The Ballad of Tim Ballard” on the last record with this in mind. While The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment is nothing but allegory, I would have never ventured into historical fiction like I did on “Lempira (Or, The Lencan Crusade),” which is such a thematically adventurous track: liberalism’s reification of minorities inevitably leads to fascist reductions of history, violence is inherent and required in the founding and maintenance of nation-states, the dehumanization of entire nations of people due to the actions of their government, and the unfounded assumption of good faith in diplomacy especially and particularly when it comes to empire interacting with indigenous populations (which is, of course, tied to the first point regarding the reification of minorities). There’s also this idea of the false dichotomy of “protest” music as opposed to “personal” music, which is obviously very deeply intertwined with my work, but on a song like “DIYUSA,” I feel like the approach is totally different. It’s a song about my scene and my frustrations with it. Some bits can be taken as truisms, but the text is very explicitly just me venting. Even so, I think it manages to blur these lines without the use of metaphor. If there’s anything else, I would say it’s probably the dissolution of separation from the text and the listener. Even at its most personal, the last record is always hiding behind the wall of metaphor. The end of “The North” is just about as far from that as I think is possible. It’s hyper-interpersonal. It’s impossible to feel like it’s not about you.

What should we expect from a Cime live?
Every show is so different and it feels like every few months we start venturing into new, weirder directions. We have a huge live band—8-9 people. Two drummers, synths, horns, no-inputs mixers, two electric and one acoustic guitar, bowed singing saw, accordion, keys, two or three vocalists… it’s a war of sound, even on our best days. We are also a very confrontational band, I feel. I like to go into the crowd, I like to hurt myself on stage. Our philosophy, coming about spontaneously from the regular phenomenon of performing for indifferent audiences, is simple: if they don’t care, then the least we can do is make it hard to ignore us. Sometimes we’re tight, sometimes we aren’t. But it’s always interesting, for better or for worse.

What will be your next moves?
I’m very proud of this record, but it didn’t come about without its fair share of growing pains. The success has focused our attention and shot our motivation up tenfold. For the first time, it feels like everyone is just as into it as I am. We have a very solid philosophical foundation for our next project: expanding on the success of the dense instrumentation of this record while also choosing a much weirder instrumental palette to work with—based around the concept of an anachronistic early-20^th century Latin American orquestatipica or marching band—making greater use of analog synthesizers and no-input mixers for both tonal and atonal purposes, writing a greater number of comparatively shorter songs which still rise and fall just as much as they do on this record while flowing together seamlessly and a little more cohesively, ultimately attempting to marry the syncretic triumphs of early sass alongside the dynamics emblematic of emo to experimental big band & spiritual jazz to create a new New Latin American songbook akin to the unbelievably caustic tropicanibalismo. In a lot of ways it is a very direct spiritual successor to, while also being an expansion& refinement of the language of, our work preceding The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble.