Loop: Deserto Rosso

Quentin Gas & Los Zíngaros
Album: Caravana
Release Date: 2017
Spain

Quentin Gas talks about Deserto Rosso

It was 2015 when I decided to release my first solo album called Big Sur under the name of Quentin Gas & Los Zíngaros. You could say it was a compilation album of the songs I had written throughout my life and never released mixed with other new songs with a glimpse of something I hadn’t tried before, the fusion with flamenco. That first experiment, cold but nevertheless interesting, brought me to the idea of an entirely flamenco album, avoiding stereotypes or repeating older attempts at mixing both rock or pop with flamenco sounds.

I did not know the path that would least to find that formula until the fall of that same year, my friend Jorge convinced me to attend one of the most interesting psychedelic music festivals in the world, Liverpool Psych Fest. The experience helped me discover a new path for my music to follow. When I returned home I started writing the songs that would later make the Caravana album. One of which is Deserto Rosso.

It is simple, energetic and it has this certain epic air. I wanted to mix many sensations, many styles, many cultures. It was clear to me that the rhythm had to be German kraut rock, but the atmosphere, the arrangements had to be psychedelic and the tone needed to be flamenco. For the lyrics, I wanted that same impossible mix… that’s why I thought of the greatest Andalusian surrealist poet of all time, the great Federico García Lorca, and I borrowed his wonderful verses from a very popular zorongo, “The moon is a small well, the flowers are worth nothing, what is worth are your arms when they hug me at night“. But I also wanted part of the lyrics to be mine so I added a second verse: “Between gust and gleam I saw you dance there in the distance with hypnotic rhythm in a timeless sunrise.” But I needed another verse for the most epic part of the song… the one that mixes a flamenco martinete with Georgy Ligeti’s piece for Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

I already had the mix, the perfect blend of all my passions: Anglo-Saxon music, flamenco, poetry and cinema. Every time the band rehearsed it, I kept telling the others, “Something is still missing, it is not yet complete”. Then I met Niño de Elche.
Quentin on how he added the last piece into the song.

At the time I was discovering the wonderful and disturbing universe of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema. His movie Il Deserto Rosso was unbearably overwhelming. The scene of Mónica Viti visiting that jungle of antennas was the inspiration for those last verses I needed: “In a Deserto Rosso made of antennas we got to know what the stars were saying“. I already had the mix, the perfect blend of all my passions: Anglo-Saxon music, flamenco, poetry and cinema. Every time the band rehearsed it, I kept telling the others, “Something is still missing, it is not yet complete”. One day, by chance, I discovered an artist at that time not that well known but who was beginning to get the attention of the underground scene, he went by the name Niño de Elche. His voice, his personality, his universe, captivated me instantly and suddenly I felt that he was what my song lacked, it was that voice, that way of expressing flamenco, new but ancient at the same time, unique and irreverent. I was trying something new, so I also needed someone who I believed with full confidence was going to revolutionize flamenco, as it happened months later with his album Voces del Extremo. I met him at the last Monkey Week festival held in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz). We both performed there and he was introduced to me by Tali Carreto. I told him about my song. I told him that I could no longer conceive it without his voice. He told me to send it to him. And the rest is history.

Lyrics: Deserto Rosso

La luna es un pozo chico
Las flores no valen nada
Lo que valen son tus brazos
Cuando de noche me abrazas

Entre ráfagas y destellos
Te vi danzar allí a lo lejos
Con un ritmo hipnótico
En un amanecer sin tiempo, sin tiempo

En un deserto rosso
Hecho de antenas
Pudimos saber
Lo que decían las estrellas

Tracklist: Caravana

1. “Punyab”
2. “Caravana”
3. “Deserto Rosso”
4. “Sultana”
5. “Romance”
6. “Persia”
7. “Caravana 2”
8. “Turkia“
9. “El Pedío”
10. “La Luz del Silencio”
11. “Luna de Oriente”
12. “Tanger”
13. “Lebrija”
14. “Mala Puñalá”