About five years ago, Marcos Hecht was hanging out with some friends in Villa Serrana, in the department of Lavalleja. “Suddenly, a neighbor showed up with a guitar. ‘Hi…’ she said, and played a song. It was an incredible moment. There was no light at all; I filmed it and uploaded it to YouTube.” The neighbor with the guitar was Eco López, from Kif, one of the bands that appeared in the first season.
Pardelion Music is an online music channel designed for the digital generation, tailored to the way that generation consumes music: Hecht explains that “if you want to listen to music, you go to Spotify; if you want to experience music, you go to Pardelion Music.” It views music as a way to connect with artists, where the quality “matches what’s happening in the world.”
Hecht, who earned a bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Communication from ORT, explained that they had to do a lot of research before getting started. “We looked at what was happening around the world—there were a lot of experiments on music channels like The Blogotheque, Tiny Desk Concert, and KEXP, a Seattle radio station. And we learned a lot about how music is consumed: people wanted to listen to a variety of artists rather than an entire album.” The unique touch came from the audiovisual quality, the attention to locations, art, and photography, and the overall aesthetic—for example, using photographic lenses.
We used to see musicians at La Comedia or in various Uruguayan bars, and we were listening to incredible artists—the best in the world. We simply wanted to share with the world the amazing musicians we have in Uruguay. That was the channel’s original mission. I think it had to do with filming music to share.
Landing in Madrid
“For a long time,” Hecht says, “we’d dreamed of crossing the border. ‘We’d done it with artists who came to Uruguay; that helped open up a channel to the outside world because we started getting a lot of traffic from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Spain,’ Hecht remarked.”
One of Pardelion’s partners moved to Spain, and that’s how they opened the Madrid office. Working remotely, they prepared for the upcoming season: director Alfonso Guerrero in coordination with the director there, Ilan Rosenfeld; the director of photography and project partner, Diego Rosenblatt, with the director of photography in Madrid, Dani Borbujo; while Hecht worked closely with Rosenfeld and the Spanish producer, Joaquin Vallés. “This is because, in a way, we’ve established a format and have many operating rules, guidelines, and objectives.”
In fact, the team in Uruguay took charge of scouting artists to achieve the variety the channel was aiming for. Once the lineup was selected, the artists were asked to perform a cover of a song by an artist from the Río de la Plata region, “as a way to bring together the audience here with the audience there and build the bridge that, ultimately, was what interested us most.” Hecht notes that this “was really great” because it led to covers of songs by Gustavo Cerati, Andrés Calamaro, Gustavo El Príncipe Pena, and Eduardo Mateo. “It was very interesting and, at the same time, very rewarding, because those are the videos that have generated the most traffic.”
https://youtu.be/qk3X49R8t8s?si=70GvbSDuiNiAvt4Z
They are currently working on a new season in Buenos Aires. “We’ve been there a couple of times talking to artists and looking for brands and sponsors, which is very important for the project.”
We record in a single take because we believe it’s essential that the song be exactly as it was played and sung; to us, that’s almost sacred. We always choose the best take for the audio, and the videos are edited based on that.
Hecht explained that the acoustic format stems, on the one hand, from an aesthetic pursuit, but on the other, from a practical constraint that—in his words—allows them to exist as a channel. “The larger a band’s lineup, the longer the recording takes, and the more complex and complicated it becomes; so, in a way, we limited it to eight audio inputs, which was the first sound card we worked with.”
In any case, he acknowledged that, over time, they found something interesting in that “because it forced the bands to scale back a bit and find a way to make things work by being smaller and getting back to their roots.”