What is a decade?
Find the answer at www.dictionary.com/decade where it will tell you that a decade is a period of ten years beginning with a year whose last digit is zero.
What is an artist?
Find the answer at jorgequinos.bandcamp.com where you will be embraced by the most captivating soundscape you will ever encounter.
A musician unlike any other, the artist known as Jorge Quiños enthralls the senses with unparalleled flair and virtuosity. He is prolific, having released eight albums and one EP since the decade began. The Quiños vision has survived technological advancement, transitioning from Pocketband to FL Studio in 2017. His most recent record GOAT is one of 2019’s best and the apex of a mind-bending career.
To convince our artist of the decade to agree to his first ever interview we hired legendary radio host Zane Lowe. Quiños has notoriously never revealed his true identity. We knew nothing about the man behind the music… until now.
ZANE: Your music often divides opinion. Many hail you as a genius who has sculpted a new Utopian symphonic landscape. The Stanley Kubrick of music. But some of your albums have been described as “unlistenable diarrhea”, “sonic terrorism” and “shitecore”. What would you say to people who can’t understand why you are the most important artist of the decade?
JORGE: On a fundamental level I do not agree with art criticism. In 1907 a young man with a dream was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. The admissions committee deemed his drawings “unsatisfactory” in the same way NME labelled my album Infinity+1 as “soul destroying audio molestation”. You can agree or disagree with the comments, but the fact is that both of these judgments caused a lot of pain for millions of people. Negative criticism is fascism. It’s as simple as that.
Your strong anti-reviewer opinions lead me to believe that you, Jorge Quiños, are NOT the same person who runs this music blog, as some have theorised.
That is an astute and reasonable observation.
Since you burst onto the scene there has been endless speculation about your true identity. One year after the debut Quiños album, Daft Punk released Random Access Memories which many felt was very similar. So I have to ask – are you secretly one of the members of Daft Punk?
Am I in Daft Punk? It’s a question I get asked frequently, but I think it’s time to finally give a concrete answer. In a way, yes I am. In another way, no, not at all. I am not one member of Daft Punk but both, and also neither.
There are hundreds and hundreds of people who I believe I am, but also millions and millions of people I hope I am not. Everyone operates in a liminal space between yes and no.
Thanks for clearing that up. Your 2016 album 3xtinction is about the breakdown of society and the eventual destruction of the human race. It seems like we’re getting close!
When I was writing that album I was thinking about something that happened to me while I was serving in World War II. I parachuted into Rotterdam, Netherlands, but landed way outside the city in the Crooswijk forest. I soon stumbled upon a lost and frightened eight-year-old boy. He had fled the city with his mother, but enveloped by a dark forest and a starless night they were practically blind. The boy’s mother had accidentally stepped into a speeding river and been swept away to god knows where.
I decided to abandon my orders in favour of leading this boy as far away from the warzone as possible. We trekked for miles and miles through treacherous terrain, trying to avoid being shot at by boy soldiers who were no less scared and lost than my companion. The landscapes kept changing. Eventually, we stopped counting the days. One night we were awoken by two men with knives at our throats. We were trespassing on their farmland.
It turned out we had walked all the way to Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia. That’s almost 3,000 miles. The farmers adopted the boy and he wrote a best selling novel about our experience, which was adapted into a film starring Viggo Mortensen.
Me? I began my long walk back to Rotterdam, more determined than ever to defend the city from the Nazis. But when I got there it was 1948 and the war was over.
The boy was Cormac McCarthy?
That is correct.
Your song ’21st Century Socialism’ is widely considered to have kick-started the surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn which led to Labour gaining seats in the 2017 election. Do you think the recent election result would have been different if you had released a follow-up song?
We’ll never know, but I have my suspicions. I know that my political music has influenced a lot of people. I recently received a letter from legendary comic book writer Alan Moore who told me that my music inspired him to publicly endorse Labour. It was the first time the legendary anarchist had voted for over forty years. He also wrote that his character Doctor Manhattan (a post-human God) was based on me. Unfortunately we didn’t get the result we wanted and now the UK will become an isolationist Tory hellscape.
Well, hold on a second, Jorge. There are some sensible Conservative policies. Take the Australian style points-based immigration system for example. That makes total sense to me.
Wow, I didn’t expect that from you, Zane. You didn’t move from the UK to New Zealand until you were in your twenties. Do you really think other people should be denied the fantastic opportunities you had? That’s a typical “I’m alright Jack” Tory mentality.
I’ve got serious concerns about this immigration policy. There are three questions I would ask Boris Johnson. One. Why do we even need further restrictions when EU migration levels have significantly dropped since 2016? Two. Which professions will this government decide are not needed in this country? Three. Can we be sure that who is accepted and who is rejected will not be influenced by the Prime Minister’s history of racist remarks?
You make some good points. Have you considered running for leader of the Labour Party?
I’ve had thousands of letters and messages encouraging me to run. I have the backing of around seventy to eighty MPs but we’ll have to wait and see.
Obviously fans want to know what they will get from Jorge Quiños in the next decade. Are there any projects in the works?
In September I was approached by Juice WRLD. He wanted to make a collaborative album with me. I worked on the instrumentals and he rapped over them. However, that album will not see the light of day because of Mr. WRLD’s untimely death.
Surely Juice WRLD’s fans will want to hear his last work? I know I do.
Believe me, it was his best. But I don’t want your fucking blood money, Zane. Also, there is an unfortunate irony about the album because it was all about the joys of being alive – and a lot of emphasis was placed on not wanting to be dead. In fact, the record was titled I LOVE BEING ALIVE PART 1: LIVING AIN’T EASY (UNLESS U ME).
I’m also trying to become one of Hollywood’s most revered screenwriters. I’ve recently finished a screenplay I worked on for twenty years. It’s a sequel to both Bad Boys and Good Boys called Good Boys vs. Bad Boys. Who wouldn’t want to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Michael Bay’s beloved action series try to take down Jacob Tremblay’s adorable gang from Seth Rogen’s comedy hoot? It’s an idea I have had for two decades and with help from Paramount Pictures I’m now finally ready to make it a reality.
But Mr. Quiños, Good Boys was only released this year and Jacob Tremblay was born in 2006. How could you have been working on the script for twenty years? You’re telling a blatant lie.
This interview is over.
Laser Falcon 