La Gusana Ciega

Let's say you're the British pop band Oasis. You've sold 50 million records worldwide. And you're playing a show in Mexico City.

Who do you ask to open for you?

Señoritas y "señoritos," introducing La Gusana Ciega – the Mexico City band that opened for Oasis, recorded with producer Martin Bisi of Sonic Youth and White Zombie fame and released three well-received albums in the late 90's before breaking up in 2002.

After a few years of side projects, La Gusana Ciega ("the blind worm") reunited in 2006 and released their fourth LP, La Rueda del Diablo.

We swapped ymeils with singer Daniel Gutierrez and asked him: ¿qué pex?

With reggaetón and other forms of Latin music getting so much exposure, do you think that rock music can compete?

I recently saw this movie, 300, about the Spartan army. In this case, rock en español would be the Spartans. We choose our battles and our battleground and we play rock because that is what we live for – no matter what is the new "in thing" for the masses. We will always play rock and do it for the same reasons. Now, more than ever, rock en español is an established art form and the means of expression for an ever-growing crowd. We were here before reggaetón and we will be here after to face the new “in thing.” So we fight on this imaginary battleground against an army of musical mercenaries without questioning, with out fear – we will not retreat. But in reality, I don’t think we compete, our target is a more critical and ambitious public.

How have La Gusana's fans reacted to your reunion?

We were pretty sure that our fan base would be there for our return, but we were surprised by the fact that we see a lot of younger fans at the concerts and on our MySpace. I think La Gusana came of age and sort of mistified as a band during our absence. Lots of kids whose older brothers or sisters listened to La Gusana passed the music down and the younger ones could only hear the records, thinking they would never see La Gusana live. When we got back all these kids new the songs from the records and at the concerts they were singing songs that we didint even play on our regular sets. Its a blessing to have a young crowd eager to listen to the music and we plan to make the most of it.

Has the internet helped you reach out to new fans?

For sure, we have fans from countries we have never been to, but we know how they heard from us. The internet is making this a smaller world and that is helping bands do their promotion directly to the people that are intrested.

How has rock music in Mexico changed?

During the time we stopped working, the music industry was changing so much that we were not involved in the vortex of things with La Gusana. By the time we got back together, we had a better view of things and had a clearer idea of how to get things going again. The music industry is going back to basics, where the most important thing is the artist and the music. Record sales have gone down and that affects major record labels directly, but still leaves a good margin for smaller labels and directly for artists. That also means that artists have more work to do and their carreers depend on that.

What's in your iPod these days?

Arctic Monkeys, Peter Bjorn and John, The Shins, Wolfmother, Yokosuna, Austin TV, Los Cosmetics.

Your video for "Angeles Educados" sorta looks like one of those "Mac vs. PC" commercials. Where did you come up with the idea for video and how involved are you in that process?

I havent seen the Mac > PC commercials, but I guess we would be Mac people. I think the idea evolved into the final product from a stop motion idea. We produced and directed the video ourselves and had a small budget to do it. In order to have a good quality image and a fun video, we started changing ideas and narrowing things down until we came up with the idea. So basically, we wanted a simple video that shows the band having fun. We did a few things in reverse, at different speeds and we ended up with a happy quirky video.

Now, we knew we were not inventing anything new, but a few weeks after we finished our video, I was waching TV and I saw an '80s video of some band. I can't remember their name. But it was the same idea with the same backwards stuff and different speeds. The strange thing was, that even with the same idea, you could watch both videos and clearly place one in the '80s and one in the present.

The artwork for this record was something we were involved in from day one, and for the first time we are trying to maintain a concept from flyers, to the web page and to the cd cover – everything. We are pretty happy with that.