It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year. Flamenco music carries the sound of Spanish history within it-you can practically hear the migration patterns-and Rosalía uses it to tell the story of a doomed relationship across 11 songs, each one serving as a new chapter.
Rooted in flamenco-the Arabic-influenced Andalusian music which she has studied since a young age- El Mal Querer is a dramatic, romantic document that seamlessly links that tradition’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B. One approach-a very successful one-lies in El Mal Querer, the relentlessly gorgeous album from Rosalía Vila Tobella, a 25-year-old Spanish singer with one foot steeped in her Catalan history and the other hypebae-sneakered foot sidling into the future. “Rosalía has a very fresh and friendly beauty, but at the same time, her look is full of power that goes straight into your heart.The concept, though, is still intriguing: As the internet homogenizes individual music cultures into a big studio-quantized mish-mash, how do musicians retain the singularity of the hyper-local, often dissipating histories of their cultures? And alternately, is it preferable to take a rigid approach to that hyperlocality-or at least a defensive stance towards cultural specificity-if it stifles the kind of musical creativity that fosters a genre’s evolution. “Of course, YouTube make-up tutorials weren’t really a thing at this point, so I was reproducing looks that I liked in my own way.” “I couldn’t help but buy stuff to make wounds with lots of fake blood and stick hair to my face to look like a wolf,” he recalls. It was during the height of the European financial crash in 2010, however, that Ceferino – living on the occasional freelance job and the “conviction that (his) purpose in life was to be a make-up artist” – began to immerse himself in 90s horror films. I’m not gonna lie, there were some really boring ones.” “I surrounded myself with people who could help me jump into this world so I accepted literally any job where make-up was involved, from the fun ones to the boring ones. The Barcelona-based MUA, who is the brain behind flamenco-pop superstar Rosalía’s radically fierce beauty looks, started his make-up career at the age of 16. Let’s just say that carnival was my favourite day of the year.” “You should see some photographs of me when I was five.
“It was something inside of me, maybe from a past life,” he says.
When Javier Ceferino was young, he’d steal his mum’s make-up and lock himself in the bathroom to experiment.
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