Today we’d like to introduce you to Jose Vasquez.
Hi Jose, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I started writing MIDI-sequenced music in 2006 — I was 13 years old, a middle-school band kid who got “promoted” from alto saxophone to tenor sax thanks to my band director’s keen ability to spot innate musical talent. I played in the symphonic band – the school’s top band – throughout middle school and spent a lot of my free time listening to music and lurking online. I was frequently tuned in to the Houston classical NPR station, which played a radio show called Music from the Movies that introduced me to James Newton Howard’s score for Lady in the Water, one of my first experiences with the synaptic miracle that is minimalist music. I also developed an appreciation for Baroque and Modern music, particularly Schoenberg, thanks to the classical NPR station. I wasn’t a music elitist though. I enjoyed a mix of pop music — Rihanna, Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé, Eminem, Kanye West, Britney Spears — as well as Houston rap and chopped and screwed, which I became familiar with both over the radio but especially through CD rips and compilations. Keep on Stacking pt. 3 had a huge impact on me. I was also definitely one of those MySpace scene/emo kids, completely immersed in discovering new bands and music through the platform. Interestingly, customizing my MySpace page also taught me the basics of HTML and CSS.
One MySpace band that profoundly influenced me was the Dresden Dolls, a piano and drums duo that embodied Brechtian punk cabaret. Their music inspired me to take up the piano, so I turned to YouTube tutorials to learn on an old, inexpensive 5-octave non-weighted, unresponsive, low-polyphony keyboard from the 90s my parents had lying around. Taking inspiration from all the music I liked listening to, my early compositions were crafted on MIDI software like Finale and Musescore and blended steady 8th-note trap-like hi hats with piano chords and repeated motives to create a chill-core, maybe even proto-vaporwave vibe.
In high school I placed into the honors band my freshman year. I didn’t really fit in with the honors band kids, in part because I came out as gay in middle school to shoot my shot with a trombone player who was also in band. He said no and I got bullied for even asking, and that energy carried over into high school. The same popular kid who had turned me down also made the Honors band, and I, being the shy emo loner, became an easy target for ridicule. After deciding to leave band, I used my newfound free time to become the founding president of my high school’s National English Honor Society chapter. This experience sparked my passion for writing, which seamlessly evolved into my interest in crafting lyrics. During my junior year, my AP English teacher became my greatest supporter in high school. She was genuinely impressed by my writing abilities and frequently encouraged me to enter various competitions. On one occasion, she declared in front of the entire class that I was the sole student permitted to bend the rules of English. She believed I had a strong grasp of grammar and was ready to explore creative expression with language. Another memorable moment was when, during an English Honor Society induction ceremony, she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “José, you’re going to be famous one day.” It took me a while to absorb those words, but now they serve as a powerful source of inspiration for me.
Although my grades in high school were bad because I never did my homework, skipped classes, would go to underage drinking parties, and snuck into 18+ music shows (I saw Stereo Total play, RIP to the legendary Françoise Cactus), my English teacher wrote an admissions letter that highlighted my reading and writing skills, noting that I was engaging with graduate-level texts. She mentioned my tendency to dive into Schopenhauer and Kant after completing class assignments. Thanks to her support, I gained admission to Allegheny College, where I pursued advanced piano studies under the tutelage of Dr. Alec Chien, while also receiving formal training in piano from a local private instructor. However, college wasn’t where I wanted to go after high school, though I am grateful for the experience. I wanted to be in a punk band. My immigrant parents strongly opposed my dreams, insisting I needed to pursue a stable career. I reluctantly enrolled in college, majored in philosophy, and ended up leaving after a year. I didn’t fit in and the other students didn’t seem to like me all that much.
After coming back from Allegheny College, I immersed myself in the punk scene in Houston, Texas, and started learning to play guitar. During my high school years I was already volunteering at the Houston info shop Sedition Book, where I encountered lowlife Brandon Darby — Breitbart owner and FBI informant — who posed as an activist but turned out to be an agent provocateur, ensnaring activists into plots to blow up police vehicles. All the red flags were there. But anyway, when I returned from college, I found that Sedition Books had disappeared, and Montrose, the area where it was located, was undergoing significant gentrification, making it impossible for the info shop to keep going due to rising rents. And fun fact, before Sedition Books had a storefront, it operated out of a house that was set on fire by right wing extremists.
Anyway all this is to say that Sedition Books became East Side Social Center, which although still an info shop, the focus was more on music and community events. I would watch punk bands play at ESSC nearly every weekend for years before ESSC shut down. Several people asked me to play in their bands during this time but I mostly found myself caravanning with punk kids touring through the underground scenes across central and south Texas. I wrote a handful of songs during this time, but I wasn’t impressed with them, which led me to put my songwriting on hold for quite some time. I lived with my parents for a few years after leaving college but still had to pay rent, so I worked menial jobs. It was an okay middle ground since my parents nearly kicked me out of the house for dropping out of college. A few years later my mom passed and my step-dad kicked me out of the house because he was a homophobic ex-Pentecostal preacher who kept tape recordings of exorcisms he performed in the garage. And we didn’t get along.
So basically I was homeless for three or four years, and I did a lot of busking on a ukulele to get by. I spent a lot of time at the public library researching and learning about music, particularly music ontology, psychoanalysis and music, study of musical scores, musical analysis, music history, aesthetic theory. I worked odd jobs here and there, sometimes sold weed, sometimes designed and coded webpages for cam girls. I got into trouble (but never got caught) because I felt I had nothing to lose. Slept in my car, slept on friend’s couches and floors, did a lot of drugs, spent a lot of time hanging at skateparks, racing my car during slab meetups, it was a vicious sort of spiraling that went on for years. These were also liberating experiences in their own way.
Eventually my friends ended up in prison, others got too deep into drugs to even hold conversations with, some of them just disappeared. I got to a point where I was alone and had nothing. All of this culminated with Hurricane Harvey which displaced me to the point where I was living in a run-down air B&B trap house. I decided I would work for a bit, save some money and move to Austin to try to become an emo musician, so I managed to do that by 2018.
My first years in Austin were rough: working low-pay jobs, more than 40 hours per week, and sometimes working two jobs to barely cover rent groceries and utilities. Eventually though, I landed a job at the Internal Revenue Service and worked my way up to a decent cubicle position where I was able to save enough money to start thinking about making music. Not having any friends here in Austin, starting an emo band like I had hoped to do was out of the question. Another musician friend, Alice Vixen, put me on to making music in a DAW. I learned it pretty quickly since I was already programming MIDI, albeit in a different UI context — finale and musescore engrave and publish sheet music, whereas programs like Ableton, Pro Tools, FL studio are more about working with audio signals in-box. Anyway working from a DAW was natural for me since I always felt like a lone wolf, so being a 1-person musical act made perfect sense.
I finally got serious about pursuing music as a career around 2020, I started DJing house music for small crowds on livestreams as well as a few house parties. I thought to myself, though, that making music wouldn’t be too hard and got started on making music after a Halloween shroom trip left me to face the fact that my work at the IRS was unfulfilling, that I am unsatisfied with life, and that I need to do what I feel is my life’s calling, which is to create music. Part of my motivation was also the feeling that the experiences I’ve had are not represented in music. Not only did I want to make music but I was certain I had something unique, different, and important to contribute to music culture. I quit my job and cashed out all of my retirement savings to set myself up to start making music. I released four demo EPs which were recorded in my bedroom studio, and now I am working on writing a full length album which I hope will be studio-recorded.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Making music is difficult and costly: there is the obvious learning curve. I don’t think people realize how expensive it is to make a recording, even just a bedroom recording: preamps, software licenses, mics, cables, graphics processing upgrades, enhanced CPU performance, plugins, distribution costs, time commitments. And that’s just costs specific to the production of a sound recording, not mentioning other aspects of music such as marketing recorded music and live-music setups.
Also, people will be quick to discourage you from pursuing your path. People will criticize you and tell you that you are untalented.
That you are wasting your time. The people who you’d think should believe in you and support you might sometimes be the people who are least supportive. And people online can be critical and hateful. It can get toxic very quickly. Homophobia is something that is difficult to navigate especially as a mumble rap/cloud rap artist, where there is so much toxic masculinity. Ultimately though, it is my struggles that shape me into a unique musician with a unique perspective and so I always take challenges as opportunities to grow, to push forward, to dig deeper.
Homelessness for me has also been a struggle, although when I was homeless after college I would often busk with my ukulele, which helped me develop foundational performance skills like dealing with hecklers, passing the hat, asking for tips, responding to audience interactions, etc. No mud, no lotus. Difficult experiences will teach you invaluable lessons. Be grateful for the hard lessons.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a musician who makes digicore and cloud rap music. I am most proud of my growth as an artist, not just artistic growth in music but in different disciplines, growing as a writer, growing as a filmmaker, growing as a human being. What sets me apart from others is my unique perspective and unique musical development trajectory. I compose my music in a way that is deeply indebted to minimalists like John Adams and Philip Glass. So much cloud and emo rap (and rap in general) sounds the same: ticking hi-hats, pounding 808 kicks, autotune cranked up to 100%. I want to pay homage to 90s emo and shoegaze, use more natural vocal stylings, think in terms of textural sound mass rather than chord progressions, in short I want to change up the game with something fresh and unique, something only anarchoskum could write and produce.
What does success mean to you?
I don’t think in terms of success or failure. I am a buddhist practitioner and try to stay grounded in the moment, grounded in action and doing and being rather than becoming carried away with ideas about what success should be. I suppose another way to think of it is that by making music I already have succeeded in what I wanted to do: make music. Some people think that to be a successful musician you have to have a lot of followers, have high engagement metrics, make money on merch, stay relevant, try not to fall off once you’re in the spotlight. These ideas of success come from music label execs, not from actual musicians. Music is about human connection and emotion. As long as I write a song that someone else connects with, then I’ve done what I set out to do.
Pricing:
- All my demos are available on my website on a Pay-What-You-Want basis. I intend to release my upcoming album on a free/pay-what-you-want basis as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.SkumboiRecords.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anarchoskum/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-vasquez-128191205/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@anarchoskum
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@anarchoskum
Image Credits
All photography by anarchoskum
