Your new mixtape, Red Burns, came out last Monday. What’s the significance of the title?



GIOVANNI ESCOBAR: Red Burns is a title that I'd been sitting with for a while. I didn't know quite what it meant, I just liked the way it sounded. I finally came to know what it was [during] my most recent trip back to Puerto Rico, in April or May. I had been speaking a lot more to my family about why we are where we are. How everybody ended up in their specific predicaments. It's just crazy how far back people go — how far you've gone from the earliest ancestors. Discovering all of these bad things that happened to us over time and trying to find a reason for them. I think, ultimately, that's what Red Burns is — it’s a curse, that I think people of the diaspora have. I guess the root is, ultimately, manifest destiny — this willingness of colonial white settlers from Europe who chose to violently alter the history of another people for the rest of time. We can never undo these things.

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There is constant conversation about decolonization of language, but this thing is going to be with us for the rest of our lives. This is actually [a] man-made tragedy, and this is going to happen until the end of time. I don't see [the curse of] Red Burns ever going away, you just have to live with it and it will be there on your most exciting days, your worst days. It's sad as shit. Realizing this and coming up with it, doing it in a way that is artistic and important, it's just by chance. I didn't create this, it's always been there for people to find.

This project feels so multimedia — the homepage features a collection of memes and GIFs. Then you have the album art and tracklist, additional components of excerpts and quotes. The mixtape itself sounds like an audio-scrapbook — you’ve got skits, outside recordings. What’s the thinking behind these multiple forms?



ESCOBAR: I think that has less so to do with decisions we make in what SOTC is, but moreso how we feel the music can best be served by all these other things. I think contextualizing what we do is just as important as the way we actually made or composed the songs because, I think we’re very aware how inaccessible some of the things we do can be. There are other ways to tell the story that don’t only have to do with music. I think being confined to being a musician is frustrating sometimes. Not everything you feel can come out in a song, and that has to do with restrictions of your own musical teaching or words themselves. We talk about being frustrated about stuff like that a lot.



With Red Burns, we had more to say about how we feel, more than trying to be good songwriters. We were going through a lot while this album was coming to be. There were personal things and... impending doom. I hope that gets across in the album, this obsession or theme with the end of the world as we know it. You think about something like Trump — and I hope to not make this too much about politics — but that really crushed us. Not that we were surprised, but, that happened and we were there for it. How do you conduct the art that you’re trying to conduct while something like that is happening? At least for me, it’s like, How do I write a love song ever again? It just didn’t feel important anymore. Somehow, things like a skit or a poem just felt more appropriate on what we were trying to say through this album.



JASPER MARSALIS: To add on to that, How do you capture an emotion, but not lie to someone? I feel like that’s a huge issue in songwriting. At a certain point, you have to create this emotion that has to be consumed by people who are listening. Also, a lot of our influence does come from outside of music. I feel like the website is an homage to all the things that are not “art” so to say.