Rafa and Pichis are usually your everyday young couple in love living the big city life in Mexico D.F. The guy is a born and bred studio musician and the gal the entrepreneur of an up coming “Poptail” (Ice Pop + Cocktail = Poptail) business, and when they spend way too much time together they start recording instruments and end up turning into HOAX. They’ve been releasing a couple of tracks over the last year that sound pretty interesting in a dark neo synth pop kind of way, and it seems 2015 might see their debut on local stages, at least for starters. I contacted them with a quick questionnaire to find out more about their misterious musical proposal and chemistry, although in the end it turned out way goofier than we all expected, dark goofy.
Describe your music through: the title of a book, the title of a movie, a tattoo, and a sacred rite that you have to make up right now.
Book: Briefing for a descent into Hell by Doris Lessing
Movie: Girl, Interrupted
Tattoo: Me no comprende.
Sacred Rite: Bacchanalia
From what I’ve been able to hear something like “dark synth pop” comes to mind. How would you guys categorize your strain of music?
R: A friend of ours always catalogs our music as Doom Pop. We love this description. It obviously comes from Doom Metal, with bands like Tiamat. We’re not really in that genre, but the pop helps.
F: Beyoncé meets Lorde at a black mass.
Tell me more about how this Project came about. You’ve been working it for a while now right?
P: We would get drunk and start spending way too much time in the studio, so the most logical step from there was to start playing with everything we had at hand. Step by step things started to take some shape and we named it [HOAX] afterwards.
R: We postponed the project for a while because Breaking Bad got in the way.
Would you say there’s something particular about your relationship being that you’re a music duo and a couple?
R: We can work until very late.
P: We can work in our underwear.
How do you guys split the instrumental work?
R: We use all sorts of things in the studio: acoustic drums, databending, programming, digital and analog synths, and field recordings among others. When we play live everything simplifies, we each use a sampler, a controller and a synth.
This one is for Pichis: Rafa is kind of the chief of orchestra due to his experience. What you say is the most important thing he’s taught you?
P: I learned to be patient and appreciate all the small pieces that give as a full result a song with which we are happy.
What are you working on in terms of your live performance?
R: Live shows are our priority now. We’re setting up an A/V performance, but we still haven’t achieved what we want so we’ve been considering simplifying it a bit so we can accelerate the process. The challenge will be not to lose our essence so we’re able to give a full show and be happy with it.
The last 2 tracks you released, “Wrong” and “Look Away” sound like a pretty solid concept. What plans do you have for this music and for the rest of the year in general?
R: We’re about to launch our first EP, we still have to do the mixing and mastering, and we’ll definitely be playing a lot by mid 2015.
P: Sponsors #wink #wink
Keep a track of HOAX starting with this brand new track “Wrong” and we’ll be sure to let you know when that live HOAX A/V performance is set and ready to hit your town later this year.