The composer and producer is also known as the guitarist for the Quito rock band Guardaraya.
What words cannot tell on the screen of cinemas or television can be told by gestures and, of course, music. The joys, the sorrows and the stress of the actions that narrate a story are also projected from the melodies that make up your sound band.
The most recent ecuadorian movie take me for a walk It was the opportunity for the producer and composer from Quito Jason de la Vega of being able to transmit the emotions of this plot through the compositions of his authorship. The film premiered in 2016 at international film festivals and only opened in the country last year. So, both for those who have already seen it and for those who have not, everyone can relive or recreate the feelings of the film through its melodies, which have just been released on Spotify.
“Do incidental music (original score) for a movie it’s not so common in our country”, explains the musician. “At least from what I’ve been researching I think it’s the first series of compositions for cinema who gets on one digital platform, which is the medium where several generations listen to music”.
The compositions created for take me for a walk reveal electronic dyes, which is a bit of the imprint that identifies De La Vega, also recognized as the guitarist of the Quito rock band guard line, with more than 20 years of activity, where he also plays the synthesizer and in fact produced his latest album, I went back.
“The production of the album coincided with the production of the music for the film, that’s why there are timbres that look alike”, illustrates Jason.
His link in this initiative of the filmmaker and director of the film, Michaela Wheel, was organic, as both had known each other since their college years. “I had worked with her on some documentaries and other audiovisual projects. We met at the university when I was studying Production, we had affinity, when the movie project started she approached me”, recalls the artist. “Micaela’s work was beautiful, she has great artistic ability, but her ego is the opposite.”
It is the first time that De la Vega has collaborated on a project of this type, he confesses. “I felt the need to cultivate personal projects, and one of them was this job.”
“One of the reasons why I was very fond of putting out this project is that I think incidental music is like a walk where you just go forward and that’s wonderful,” he explains. “When you make a song you go back that way, through the chorus or through the commercial hook. Making incidental music is going down a path that you don’t come back on, you build through emotions and go through them sonically, and that’s a challenge that involves other types of tools, it’s another way of playing with music and what you want to say with her”.
That job, he says, involved watching the film “thousands of times” by scene. “And the challenge was to compose in a very simple way; in fact, I had seen some independent films and it struck me that the producers and composers who had made the music did so with just a few elements, two or three, such as a bass, a keyboard and a harmonica, for an entire film” .
So he wondered if he could do it. “I used a Rhodes keyboard, an electronic piano from the 70s where many of my compositions come from. I added another synthesizer and guitar and said to myself ‘I’m done’. For a few years I’ve been experimenting with electronic music and I really like it, so that also influenced that project”.
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