Exclusive Interview with JOSE DEL CARMEN FROM 'FAILING EXPLORATION'

It was at a call center in Xela, Guatemala, where Jose del Carmen, on bass and vocals, and Marks Valdez, on lead guitar, first met in 2016 that Failing Exploration was formed.

They tried for more than a year to find new band members but were unsuccessful, so Jose moved to Guatemala City for work in 2018 and began writing and recording music in his bedroom the following year under the name “Failing Exploration.” A severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome that culminated in tunnel decompression surgery left him unable to play guitar or bass for most of 2020 and 21. EOMG signed him and he began planning a full-length album.

Music inspired by “Slow Drive,” “The Smashing Pumpkins,” “Siguer Ross,” “My Chemical Romance,” and “No Devolucion” -era Thursday was created by Jose after he recovered from his injuries. The band has since become known for its signature sound of ethereal and atmospheric textures over punk rock and alternative rock riffs.

The duo completed the album “The Broken Fingers Blues” with Marks on lead guitar, inspired by Jose’s struggle with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the pandemic’s uncertainty and despair.

Internal Bleeding was released on March 25th, the first of 10 songs that the duo decided to release in 2022 to better promote the album in order to release the songs sequentially. Check out the exclusive interview below:

1. Can you tell us a bit about where you come from and how you got started?

FAILING EXPLORATION: So there’s two people in the band right now, Marks (the guitarist) and myself. We met back in 2016 while working in a call center in our hometown of Xela, in Guatemala, and we were both trying to form a band. Some guys invited us to form a Pink Floyd cover band but it didn’t go anywhere after the first rehearsal, so it ended up being just the two of us, then we spent like 2 years trying to find new members but didn’t have much luck, so then I thought “screw it, we’ll record our own music and find more people when the time is right!”

2. Did you have any formal training or are you self-taught?

FAILING EXPLORATION: Mostly self-taught, the very first band I tried to join told me to play bass cause I couldn’t play the guitar so I started learning how to play blink-182 and Joy Division songs on the bass and went from there, then everything related to music production, guitar pedals and stuff like that came from YouTube tutorials

3. Who were your first and strongest musical influences and why the name ‘FAILING EXPLORATION’?

FAILING EXPLORATION: The Smashing Pumpkins and My Chemical Romance are my two favorite bands since I was 6 years old, and when I started writing my own music, they were the building blocks on top of where we developed a huge part of our sound.

The name is actually taken from a comic book I was writing, “A failing exploration” was the name of the first chapter, which I decided to re-purpose once I decided to pursue music instead of writing and when I realized that comic book would never be completed

4. What do you feel are the key elements in your music that should resonate with listeners, and how would you personally describe your sound?

FAILING EXPLORATION: I like to say we’re Alternative Rock because there’s a lot of different genres that we pulled from, so there’s shoegaze and dream pop but also a lot of punk rock and emo stuff so I think Alt Rock is a broad enough term to catch everything we’re doing. Our music is fast and aggressive but it can also be ethereal and dreamy and at the same time, the lyrics come from a place of vulnerability and emotion so I think it’d be easy for it to resonate with people in the shoegaze or post rock scene or people who love sad songs about hard times to remind them that they’re not alone and that it is more than OK to reach out to someone if they need it

5. For most artists, originality is first preceded by a phase of learning and, often, emulating others. What was this like for you? How would you describe your own development as an artist and music maker, and the transition towards your own style, which is known as INDIE?

**FAILING EXPLORATION**: If you go back to the first few songs we put out, back when Failing Exploration was just me, there’s hardly any originality there, I just wanted to do basically what all of those Nu-Metal and Post-Grunge bands of the late 90s were doing, I just wanted dirty guitars and angry lyrics, then I had to deal with severe carpal tunnel syndrome, surgery and then months of physical therapy meant I couldn’t really play or do anything other than listen, and when I started to re-discover my love for slower, more experimental bands like Slowdive and Sigur Ros, I just thought “I want to mix that with what I am already doing” so when I started working on the new album and writing the songs we are putting out now, we realized we now sounded like Failing Exploration

6. What’s your view on the role and function of music as political, cultural, spiritual, and/or social vehicles – and do you try and affront any of these themes in your work, or are you purely interested in music as an expression of technical artistry, personal narrative and entertainment?

FAILING EXPLORATION: I think this is a matter of opinion for each musician, but for me, specially since I lean Left pretty heavily and follow world news pretty closely, a lot of things like discrimination, climate change, corruption, are subjects that I think about a lot so writing about that doesn’t feel any less natural than writing about depression for example. Our debut album is pretty much focused on the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic isolation on mental health but a few songs about conspiracy theorists, corporation putting profit over people’s lives do find a way to connect to the central narrative of the album as well.

7. Do you feel that your music is giving you back just as much fulfillment as the amount of work you are putting into it, or are you expecting something more, or different in the future?

FAILING EXPLORATION: I think it’s a little bit of both, cause there’s definitely a sense of fulfillment when our music gets thrown into the world and people seem to enjoy it and connect with what we have to say and play, but at the same time, we’re nowhere near being done, we’ve got big plans for the next few years for our band and I think being able, at some point, to love off our music and be able to focus 100% of our energy into what we love to do is certainly our biggest goal right now, however long that takes

8. Could you describe your creative processes? How do you usually start, and go about shaping ideas into a completed song? Do you usually start with a tune, a beat, or a narrative in your head? And do you collaborate with others in this process?

FAILING EXPLORATION: I’d love to do a collab with people in the indie music scene, and I actually have a list of people I want to reach out to for our next album or EP. For our current album, all of the songs started out with a guitar riff, playing with different effects and textures on our guitars and building chord progressions and riffs from there, sometimes I’ll sit with a guitar and just improvise for like 5 or 6 hours until I have something I want to lay down and build a song from there… Lyrics usually come last, I record a small lead guitar part to guide myself when singing because I am completely tone deaf, I’ll then grab my notebook with lyrics and poems and re-write one of them to fit the melody and syllables needed for each part of the song

9. What has been the most difficult thing you’ve had to endure in your life or music career so far?

FAILING EXPLORATION: Social media is an undisputed necessity for independent artists now, and I think for a couple of incredibly socially awkward and anxious people like ourselves, being in front of a camera, and reaching out to new people is the one thing we know we have to get better at ASAP.

10. On the contrary, what would you consider a successful, proud or significant point in your life or music career so far?

FAILING EXPLORATION: The Broken Fingers Blues, our debut album, was pretty much written with the intent of releasing each song as an individual single and with that in mind, we ended up crafting a really solid album with no filler songs, there’s definitely much better albums out there and I’m sure we’ll learn more about how to refine our sound, both from production perspective and from a songwriting perspective, but it is the best we could do at the time, and the idea that we can easily grab our phone at any given moment, look it up on Bandcamp or any other streaming service and be able to go “We made this!” and to know that there’s people who actually like and appreciate what we do, are some of the best feelings in the world.