ABOUT

minusbaby, born Richard Alexander Caraballo in New York City, is a musician, designer, photographer, and wandering, beat-collecting international vagabond, whose finely-crafted blips and bleeps are as eclectic as the broad range of music and culture he draws inspiration from. Focusing primarily on software-based composition, minusbaby uses lo-fi electronic synthesis to create chip music that defies genre classification. One song could be a micromusic lullaby inspired by 17th Century Spanish architecture, while the next may be reggaeton for a cymbal-clapping robotic monkey, composed with an ear for fine hip-hop beats and debuted for an Australian Cattle Dog in São Paulo, Brazil. With minusbaby, '60s-'70s Brazilian pop can meet mid-'80s New York b-boy jams cut with Santería percussive patterns, everything filtered through the ears and fingers of a musician looking to push what chip music can display stylistically, and what people will experience when they hear it themselves.

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Loop de Loop, or: Cavaquinh...oh no Jan 8

Moema, São Paulo
Brasil
September 10th, 2007

Dig this. I bought a cavaquinho in Brasil; it's in the photo up there. I forgot to get a few packs of strings while at the music shop. A few weeks later, Li needed to head over to Santa Ifigênia, one of the city's shopping districts, to get some light bulbs and switches for his mother's hotel in São Roque. I was already at the hotel, so I asked him to grab a few packs of strings for me. He came back with three packs, all loop-end. I'd never seen that type of string before; neither had Li. The salesman at the music shop assumed that, like a lot of cavaquinho players, I had saved the balls from the ends of the first set of strings and would transfer them over to the new sets. Unfortunately, I'd already tossed the first set after snapping the B string while trying to figure out the chords on Cartola's "O Mundo É um Moinho".

Back home in New York City, I finally got around to restringing my instrument. This was last week. I was going to loop them around the bridge like I did the first time I restrung it, but I don't like that they dent the wood. I also think that the corner of the bridge wedged up against the strings produces too much strain and causes them to pop faster. I remembered that my father bought a little guitar for Uhuru a couple of years ago. He never uses it and one of its strings is broken. I clipped off the brass cylinders and put them into an empty shot glass for safe-keeping.

Later that evening, I felt the sudden urge to clean up. I often do this; an impromptu hurricane of making it nice. Without thinking twice, I grabbed my empty coffee mug and the shot glass, brought them to the sink and rinsed them out. I heard a few tinny, clanking sounds. Oh shit, my ball ends went down the drain.

I'm thinking up a Plan C.

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Discography - see all 3

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  Strong Arctic Winds Take Terns

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  8BP050

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  Monkey Patch