Rain Boar is a project of Zaii Valdes (Violet Silhouette) bridging shoegaze, post-punk/hardcore, and experimental-folk.
I caught up with Zaii to talk about their early musical experiences, how they started writing songs and the making of their new record “Sea Glass”.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you as a kid and what artists or bands did you enjoy the most?
Zaii-I come from a Cuban background, so a lot of island and African roots inspired me. Grant it, a lot of my work is electronic. It gave me a backbone for rhythmic melodies I would explore in a lot of other genres. My parents were also into disco and new wave; which really grabbed on to me — those big infectious hooks, reverb-drenched vocals and instruments, etc… I also grew up playing old game consoles, many of which had chiptune synthesizers as the music. So I’ve always been fond of synths as well.
CMM-How did you start making music and developing your sound?
Zaii-I started toying around with little casio and yamaha keyboards as a kid, and later got a guitar when I was about 15. And then there were these games for Playstation 2 called Frequency, and Amplitude. Those were like Guitar Hero but more rudimentary. There was a ‘freestyle’ feature where you could just use samples from artists they featured like The Crystal Method, Juno Reactor, & Meat Beat Manifesto. It really sparked a love for arrangement and beatmaking. Then I just sorta fused that with what I was doing with guitar. I knew I really liked drenched, spacious sounds. So I started experimenting with FX pedals and plugins to see how it would manipulate sound. I really loved this idea of ‘world-building’ that you could do with reverbs and delays; how playing with the notion of ‘space’ could really just take you somewhere.
CMM-You recently released an amazing new E.P. called “Sea Glass”. What was the writing and recording process for those tracks like? Any particular gear or instruments you used during the recording sessions that helped inspire you?
Zaii-Honestly it was sort of a playful experiment of running these synthy ballads I’d been working on through the Roland SP 404 and mashing them through aggressive modulation. I just wanted to make a sort of b-side vaporwave production, but it seems I may have had a little too much fun with it, and want to do more! Sea Glass will probably have a ‘re-release’, with added songs, etc.
CMM-If you could score any film director’s movie who would it be and what would the film be about?
Zaii-I would love to work with Japanese film director Takashi Miike. The film would be about a black cat named Mimi who uses synthesizers to travel through different dimensions, encountering friend and foe during her travels. The score would feature bright, sparkling synthpop all the way to dark ambient and noise.
CMM-What do you have coming up next?
Zaii-I’m going to keep on releasing singles under Rain Boar, and plan to do a full-length album in the coming months with the label Stupid Monday Records based in Austin, TX. I also have another project, Violet Silhouette, that I am about to release a full-length for and hope to do a run of dates with! I’d also like to do more video and visual content, experimenting with different visual artists.
