“If you slowly lose that fear, other fears – like for example losing someone will also go away. You accept that at some point you will lose everybody, somehow, you just need to be thankful to be with this person at this very moment.”
Introduction by Adria Leeper-Sullivan
Interview by Theo Constantinou
Photograph by Marcus Witte
His music is invigorating for the body and sends chills over the skin causing slow, intense suggestions to dance. K_Chico mixes deep and slightly monotone vocals, electronic music, and a hint of folk acoustics. Exuding dangerous and erotic vibes with a style of impermanence he as a whole becomes a model of balance between impulse and logic. With emotional release as an infectious muse he uses precise calculations in production to escalate his imagery. K_Chico takes his time to understand his surroundings, but also utilizes action as opposed to reaction when making decisions about how to live. It is okay to take things slowly, but it is also imperative that individuals formulate a personal strength. He extracts possible truths from human needs and behaviors, craves discipline to manage his body and mind, and attends to science when viewing mysticism. Appreciating to some extent that everything is bizarre, K_Chico ensures us that it is possible to normalize comforts without dictating freedoms.
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Over time youthful perception is taken away from us. Yet it is common for adults to envy the mind of a child, and it is sometimes said that children have a deeper wisdom than adults. Why do you think we move out of this form of thinking only to long for it later? When did you first realize that you were an adult and or do you feel as though you still have the spirit of a child?
As a child you haven’t made any mistakes yet. Everything is new and has to be tested. Chances are in regards to if its gonna work out or end up as a mistake. Slowly a whole catalogue of punishment starts to grow. Parents yell, friends laugh, the knee is scraped. Every mistake … something stays with you, and eventually holds you back. That’s ok. This is socialization. If you want to live in a society you have to cope with other people and yourself among them. The easiest way to avoid mistakes is to think before you act, by doing so you focus on using the logical part of the brain. You analyze, validate and ponder before you act. The emotional part of your brain only wakes up when you smell flowers, feel the sun on your face or kiss your love.
It’s really hard work to find the balance between the two hemispheres of your brain. If you are brave enough to try to find this balance, this may end up with a behavior that seems naive, childish, stupid, brave, creative; generally everything which is considered abnormal in this world- the Western world. The wisdom of a child may lie deeper because it accepts its nature-given intuition. I think that intuition is the direct connection to the nature of things. I walked my first steps back to accepting my intuition a few years ago when I started practicing martial arts. When you do that, everything gets balanced: body and mind, harmony and aggression and both hemispheres of the brain as well. If your whole “system“ is balanced and you know why that is, you can move in every direction quickly and easily restore the optimal situation. It’s like handling a heavy motorbike. For the curves you need to lean away from your center but you always come back to a neutral position.
When I was preparing for Wall Street interviews and corporate job interviews, the questions were extremely abstract like, “How many planes fly in and out of JFK International Airport everyday and why?” They obviously wanted to see how my brain would answer such a question but what do you think is the best way to extract and examine another person’s true character or thought process?
There are many ways to see how a person thinks and feels. You can provoke, applaud, question, criticize or laugh at a person. Somehow they will react to that and expose a piece of themselves. Approaching someone in this way is like playing a game and it doesn’t really lead anywhere. I try to avoid judging people. I prefer talking to them and hearing what they have to say. If I want to dig deeper, I talk about myself and then open up and really listen. With a mind that’s awake and a courage to listen to your intuition you can see and understand another person. If you really need to extract the deep character of a person – maybe even deeper than his own conscious thoughts about him/her self – you have to give him/her the power. Or more drastically, give them a weapon, teach them how to use it and then watch them put it to use. Will he defend you or attack you – or just try to look good swinging a shiny sword … ?
Most people need to know where they come from or at least ask themselves this question at one point in their lives (the origin of their creation) … What do you think would be changed in your music, or the decisions you make, if you knew the absolute answer to the origin of creation? How would this knowledge affect creativity?
I do not actually ‘know’ this absolute answer, but parts of it are all around us. There are a lot of interesting co-relations in the world, which expose a bit of how reality works. If you look at the structure and the way that an atom works and compare that to our solar system – it’s the same in many aspects. You can quantify the differences by size, weight, speed, temperature and so on. You can quantify your relation to the rest of the world in the exact same way. If you love someone, that person feels your warmth just like the first planet feels the warmth of the Sun. Constant movement around you keeps him or her from falling into you. Ever fell in love and combusted? With people you hardly know, you’re not really concerned about them, you still care for them on a basic level, but much less. Sometimes you might not even notice them, you don’t feel them with the same amount of intensity. It’s a bit like gravity between planets in relation to distance. These parallels can be seen everywhere. Cycles are also everywhere: the cycle of a year, of a day, the cycle of water and so on. The functionality of magnets is also very interesting in this regard – I know that what I m saying is not really the answer in itself, but it provides relevant vocabulary and imagery to be able to answer your question. I think that if you understand a few of these life algorithms you might catch a glimpse of where you are going and where you are coming from.
This is a question from my intern … She says …When I was younger I was fascinated by bees. I still am. It continues to baffle me that a honeybee’s defense is suicide. In the scenario of a hive being attacked what is done for the queen is admirable, but they could fight with more force if there were more than one stinger, or if the majority at least survived. I have unhealthy defense mechanisms. For the smallest things like driving a car, or talking to someone I look up to I can experience severe anxiety, lack of sleep, not eating, no focus and simply become unhealthy. Is there a method to the madness humans inflict upon themselves as precursors to events they cannot predict, or in how they deal with sudden situations? How do your defenses affect the way you make music, or share it with others? Is there a heightened sense of inspiration once these defenses are ignored?
To me fear and complying defenses have nothing to do with music itself. You can think of the human brain as an onion, and for the purposes of answering this question I would divide it into 3 layers. The kernel is the oldest one and the place where you find the basic emotions such as fear and the survival instincts. This part developed in ancient times when we had to fight against mammoths and other tribes. We had to deal with the winter and find food. Fear was a very efficient tool that enabled our survival. The second layer is relatively younger, there we developed emotions and feelings – we learned how to sensibly evaluate complex topics. It was an upgrade from the basics of hunting, eating, fighting and fucking. We needed to feel love for someone in order to create a strong bond, which then made family possible. Sadness, happiness, discomfort and a million other feelings, with nuances and cross-mixtures became the foundation of the social interaction. The youngest and the most outer layer of our brain is our ability to think. That was the next big upgrade: logic, speech, tactics etc. Having these skills gave us more power and an even better chance, not only to survive, but to live a wholesome life.
The interesting thing about these layers is how they work. All of them are still active. The difference is the power that they have over us. The oldest one is the strongest one, the second one in line is the emotional layer, the weakest one is our capacity to think. Stand in front of a raging bull running towards you and try to logically decide not run away. If you fall in love with someone who is not good for you, you will find endless reasons to be with this person anyway. There are exceptions of course, but generally it works in this way. Now what can I do to not have my fears standing in my way? I do have fears and they make me rigid at times, they stifle my movement, they paralyze my ability to think or evaluate things effectively. By making music I can channel my feelings and thoughts into a positive direction, softly turn the boat around and direct it to where I really want it to go. I don’t use my fear or defenses to make music.
I practice martial arts. It makes you move and think fast. The brain becomes more active and this leads to a higher level of sensibility. Speaking in martial arts terms: when you ‘sense’ a situation is about to escalate you don’t have to wait for the fist to fly your way to have a reason to defend yourself, you just hit hard first and hope that your lawyer can clean up the mess. And if you know this you don’t have to fight anymore, you always feel safe and by default people avoid aggressive encounters with you. If you slowly lose that fear, other fears – like for example losing someone will also go away. You accept that at some point you will lose everybody, somehow, you just need to be thankful to be with this person at this very moment.
In the closing pages of A Record of Two Friendships, C.G. Jung & Herman Hesse, by Miguel Serrano … Jung is quoted saying about the future and self introspection that … “Space flights to other worlds are still a long way off, sooner or later man will have to return to earth, and to the land from which he comes; that is to say, man will have to return to himself. Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.” Do you agree with Jung here that most people are absolutely terrified and fleeting of penetrating their own being and truly realizing themselves?
I agree, but I think we have to go. Its just not enough to know certain things, you have to experience them in order to really understand them. Sometimes you have to see something from a distance to realize its beauty. I like the yin and yang sign and I think that it’s a very good analogy for this. Everything has an opposite, which also contains a small piece of itself inside of it. And it’s all moving: black and white, yes and no, inside and outside. With breathing it’s the same, you need both parts of the cycle for it to work. As a human being you need to interact with your environment of course, but you also have to take care of yourself – outside and inside. Wanting to leave our planet to explore the outer world is really about the same thing, only the scale changes. I don’t think that it’s about running away from anything. In German there’s a perfect word to describe this: ‘wanderlust’. When you’re away long enough, you get homesick again. I would say lets run with it… and then ‘come back with it’.
