Today we’d like to introduce you to Eddika Edule Organista.
Eddika Edule, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Music is an invincible force that has the capability to produce intense excitability while listening and/or also while playing it. Music moves a person internally and externally, and to be able to generate something inside others while playing instruments with a group of people is similar to being in another space and time. To encounter those people who can share the experience of creating, growing musically and having a sort of ESP music connection is a rare find indeed. I am one out of three members that are involved in a power trio that formed out of East of Los Angeles. My colleagues in music and life-time friends, Dominique Rodriguez and Michael A. Ibarra and I have known each other since studying in the music department at Pasadena City College. We particularly studied under jazz professor and musician Bobby Bradford and connected with many other talented players in our jazz improvisation class and began playing within the school setting and also played in other musical groups together as a result of meeting there. My bandmates individually have their own musical journey story, influences and experiences playing their instruments and I am grateful to have crossed a unique pair like them, whom have been with me in the highs and lows of life and also throughout our highs in music.
The following is an account of my personal beginnings in music and how it led me to the group that I am part of now. Currently, I make music in various formats but started off making music through songs. I began exploring the guitar when I was 11 years old with the help of my dad who also plays the guitar and other instruments. At 13, I moved in with him and lived with my dad till I was 19. Most of my life as a child after the separation of my parents, I lived with my mom, I moved around a lot and went to many schools, within LA, the San Gabriel Valley as well as some states in Mexico. This pattern continued on when I moved in with my dad. Through the period of my time living with him, I went to three different high schools one in California, another in Mexico City and the last in Las Vegas. During this time, I felt the guitar to become a real friend and a confidant for expression, giving me a much needed outlet. I must also say that writing poetry and making art supported this form of expression too. I always felt like an outsider being a teenager and was much in my feelings, however music that I was listening to and the access to my dad’s instruments helped this process very much, playing guitar inspired me to get out myself and begin singing again. I’d say I owe it to music for directing me in the right path out of trouble.
As a child, when my parents were still together, my dad would have me sing with him and he would often play many records ranging from the Beatles, Hector Lavoe, Celia Cruz, Tom Jobim, Tania Maria, Sergio Mendez and so many more that I’ve left out, which was music that molded my ear and love for a variety of sounds. Particularly, I grew an interest in Brazilian music, my dad had a collection of Brazilian records and perhaps being that Spanish is my first language and was only spoken in our household, it became intriguing that I could partially understand some of the words as a child. Fast forward to being a college student when I finally transferred from PCC to UCLA, I was an undergrad student in Ethnomusicology and decided to get a minor to formally study Brazilian, Portuguese for the very reason to be able to read, write and at last fully understand the words to many songs I grew up listening to and new ones that I was learning of. Studying abroad in Brazil did help plenty to expand my development in the language and soon I began writing songs in Portuguese.
Lyrically, in the group I play with, I mainly been singing in Spanish and Portuguese up until our third album, which includes a song in English, another in both Spanish and English and for the first time we included a song with Japanese verses and a chorus in Portuguese. I especially like the phonetics of these languages and initially felt it natural and easier for me to write and sing words other than English. This preference also has a lot to do with the rhythmic flow that occurs in the melodies when phrases and the vowel endings of words and are in Spanish or Portuguese; additionally, whatever the music feel is when creating a new song, has much to do with what language I end up writing in.
By the time I was attending UCLA, as I mentioned before, I had already been in other groups and music projects alongside my current group members, Dominique and Michael, and then they became the people whom I’ve shared our present-day group, El Haru Kuroi, for close to 15 years. My bandmates and I, have grown together musically and we have had great opportunities to share the music we make within our community in Los Angeles, some parts of the U.S. and even abroad in Japan. The whole time through we have been a fiercely independent group without management and have been able to put out three albums and some music videos along the way. Although, it has not been easy to do all this ourselves, our drive to grow as musicians, enjoy creating original music together and playing it for people to share what we do through our expression as a group, has been a tremendous experience. At this stage in our lives, after experiencing regular jobs that take us away from our craft, we are now hard working musicians and continue to dedicate ourselves to what we do as our art form. The inspiration to produce original music that reveals our individual musical influences fused into one, along with the positive response from people who listen to us is something that has kept us going all these years.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
In life things are not always smooth, and this occurrence has usually been the source of inspiration to express the words that I sing. One of my personal struggles began when I started living on my own at 19 and I was always in school and maintaining a job at the same time, this part was a challenge because both school and having a job made it difficult to invest more time in the development of my craft. It never stopped me, but I felt that it limited me at times. In relation to the group, my position of being a student and having to support myself would seem to have an effect and prolong the making of our albums and would lengthen my own process for developing our songs, however, with persistence and support from my bandmates, it has been possible. It sure is a challenge to do all the work ourselves, due to not having enough funds to move forward and higher management, booking agents, or publicists, but we have had tremendous support from fans and also people like Shin Miyata who believed in us enough to bring us to Japan twice for two separate tours.
I’d like to add that when we started playing as a group, we would often notice the confused look in people while listening to our music for the first time, most likely because of not being able to understand the words, however after some shows we would get positive feedback from them because the music was still appreciated even though it wasn’t in English or anything like mainstream pop music. I used to feel this group to be an underground thing. Many times we would get asked what kind of style I consider our music to be, but honestly it’s been hard to categorize it and perhaps that is a slight challenge because we don’t fit into only one genre. I always end up describing the various styles we cover instead and until people hear it, they can decide for themselves. Personally, I do not mind not being under the umbrella of popular mainstream music, I want to make honest music that can move someone and say something because certain music does that for me, I’d like to create that feeling for someone too.
Please tell us about El Haru Kuroi.
First off, our group name is in another language that has one Spanish word at the beginning and two Japanese words that are grammatically switched: El Haru Kuroi. This means The Black Spring, actually, it literally means The Spring Black but we decided that it sounded better as El Haru Kuroi instead of El Kuroi Haru so we decided to leave it as is. Our name title alone has always been a question that people have had and how it’s pronounced. It relates much to the themes of our songs, which express both extremes of darkness and light.
We are a trio comprised of bass, drums, guitar and voice. Originally we played acoustically having percussion, up-right bass and acoustic guitar, but we soon switched to an electric version, with a drum kit, electric guitar and recently we have included an electric bass guitar and synthesizer. I am the guitarist, singer and songwriter of the group, however when we work on a song all three of us arrange it and contribute to what the themes of some songs will include. Some key aspects of our music are the polyrhythmic qualities in our songs like jazz, punk, Mexican and South American elements and having songs in multi-languages.
A specific song that we are known for, perhaps due to the well known Columbian / Mexican style of our interpretation of a ‘cumbia’, is a contagious dance song called El Cu Cui. This song was included in our first album, Sabung, which means rooster in Balinese and as a side note I’d like to say that the rooster has been a continual visual theme in our videos and album art (with the exception of our last album) because the rooster has a strong correlation with Mexican culture and also throughout many homes in the east side of LA where roosters can be heard in the early hours of the morning.
Our first video was for El Cu Cui, which means boogie man. Stories of the Cu Cui are told to children so they behave and not go out at night carelessly because the Cu Cui will get them. I took the song to a dark level and lyrically translated, it says that as a child my mother would tell me to be careful with some men because they are lions. In an alley there was bloodshed, my mom told me that he took her. It goes on to warn women not to walk the streets at night alone because he will kidnap them. This song, despite of its message involving being kidnapped and possibly killed by the boogie man, is one of our hits on the dance floor and the only one of its kind to be of this genre within the repertoire of our music. The video for it was an epic process, I had the preference of not depicting any human faces so we used paper mache animal masks instead. We actually held some mask making workshops and invited our friends to help us with this art project that we ventured in, which took us years to finish, you can see the video on youtube.
To name a few of our other song themes, we have included topics involving future inventions, space travel, human evolvement, injustices toward women and children in war, homelessness, immigrants, and of course themes of love including toxic love and forbidden love. Our songs express a wide range of dynamic themes, hence our name. Culturally we are of Mexican decent, natives of Los Angeles and our videos illustrate this. We are proud of having had the opportunity to collaborate with talented videographers to create these videos that could convey the message of each particular song. Thanks to our music and these videos we have been able to include them in some film festivals, and also getting some of our music licensed for some episodes on a Netflix series called Altered Carbon, as well as another show from Starz called Vida.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
After completing our 2nd album, Canta Gallo, our friend Eddie Rivas, whom recorded it, passed on our CD to our other friend David Gomez whom has known Shin Miyata for some time in the East LA music scene. Shin was in town and he came to one of our shows and he liked what he heard. Later we put out our third album 192192192 and Shin made it possible for us to go on a tour to Japan with this album for the Cinco de Mayo celebrations there. In 2016 we played in various parts of Japan for the first time, it was a great time.
Having traveled outside of the United States to Japan was a special experience because of the warm embrace that we received from the Japanese people. Seeing their response to our music, and us sharing an entirely different culture and mixed languages confirmed that music truly exceeds language barriers and can move anyone despite of not knowing the language. The second time we were there, last year, we were on a tour celebrating a tradition that is practiced in Mexico to honor the lives of people who have passed on, which is the Day of the Dead celebrated on the 2nd of November. Shin Miyata, worked hard for us to take this tradition to Japan and celebrate with them! We also had the special opportunity to play in a Buddhist temple called Chikurinji Temple in Kochi, thanks to our friend Masahiro Tsuzuki. Being able to witness and listen to the Buddhist monks sing and open up the night prior to our performance is memorable and one for the books.
Along the way we have had lot’s of supporters of what we do, including loyal fans that have been there since day one, they know who they are, as well as photographers such as Rafael Cardenas who has photographed us over the years and also has helped with our layouts for some of our album art. Another person I’d like to acknowledge is Shireen Alihaji who filmed two of our videos “Dia de Los Muertos” and “Ella” she also helped Jose Varela and his team (Brother Science TV) while shooting “El Cu Cui’ video. Videos are an important way to depict the sentiment of songs and is a great way to connect visually to the music. All of the folks mentioned above have been an important part of this journey and also all of the people who come to our live music performances, and people who hire us to play at their venues, museums and festivals. Thank you for the encouragement and support always.
Contact Info:
- Website: elharukuroi.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @el_haru_kuroi
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elharukuroi
- Other: https://elharukuroi.bandcamp.com
Image Credit:
Rafael Cardenas, Shireen Alihaji, Eddika Organista
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