Invite an artist to sing on a balcony and record him from the apartment across the street. This is, roughly speaking, the new project of Calle Pez, a podcast dedicated to emerging musicians that barely reaches eighty subscribers on Youtube; a space against the current of the official culture that is about to take off.
“I blurted out the idea to my neighbor over the phone. He told me to pass him my number,” Marina Margallo, host of Calle Pez and co-founder of El Balcón, tells Madrid Secreto. “He gave us permission to record from his house and now we are friends. His name is Ignacio,” she says.
The idea came up three months before it was carried out, when Margallo went up microphone in hand to his balcony (Calle del Pez, 16). “My friend Lora and I had the idea of giving concerts together from there, but the neighbors complained. As a result of creating our podcast, we decided it was better to make recordings of artists,” she explains. And that’s how a group of friends from different sectors (some from production, others from social networks) created a music studio “between heaven and earth”.
A neighborhood network driven by music
Margallo has been receiving proposals for collaborations since he published the first “balcony session” on January 7. Most are from young people in Malasaña. “If my balcony had been somewhere else, maybe the idea wouldn’t have been carried out. I live in an impersonal neighborhood that at the same time has a lot of personality. It would be great if, through El Balcón, a network could be created that would allow neighbors to get to know each other and look around,” he says.
“We would like many more artists to join; we would like it to be a showcase for emerging musicians from the Madrid scene. Besides,” says the co-founder, “I would love to create a neighborhood moment. Just as the invention of the Tiny Desk is American culture, the balcony and the neighbors are Spanish culture. Something had to be done with this.
Rusowsky, Aiko el Grupo, Repion, Tristan and Huda, among other artists from Madrid, are the names that the El Balcón team wants to bring into this underground project. So now you know: if you listen to music in Calle del Pez, don’t forget to look up.