Чилийн дуу зохиогч Gepe өөрийн уран бүтээлийн сангаа ой санамждаа тулгуурлан дахин бүтээв

With over 20 years in the music business, Chilean artist Gepe will be the first to tell you there are albums that capture a very specific moment in your life. Albums born when “a lot of things are happening,” good, bad, and everything in between; when the intensity of living through it all becomes the fuel for the songs themselves. They can be intense and chaotic, a document of who you were and what was happening around you.

ORO, Gepe’s new album, is not that kind of record. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Built from new versions of songs spanning his career, his new work trades the intensity of a single moment for what Gepe describes as “a sense of a journey and a history.” The “chaotic” album Gepe was describing before was 2024’s UNDESASTRE, a project that left him searching for calmer terrain once the dust had settled.

“The previous album was this tremendous storm,” he tells Consequence. “This one is more like several months, several days, passing through a whole bunch of seasons. It’s calmer. It’s more peaceful.”

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You can refer to ORO in many ways, just don’t call it Gepe’s greatest hits or even a compilation for that matter. In fact, you might want to stay away from the word “nostalgia” while you’re at it. “It might sound a little contradictory when you listen to this record, but I’m not nostalgic,” he says. “I’d even tell you I’m against nostalgia.”

Instead, the Chilean describes ORO as an exercise in putting his songs to the test of time: what happens when a composition written years, or even decades, ago is separated from the recording that first captured it and allowed to exist again in the present?

And if Gepe was already willing to loosen his grip on what these songs were supposed to sound like, he went one step further by handing some of that responsibility to musicians from across Latin America. Rather than simply adding their voices to his songs, collaborators like Silvana Estrada from Mexico, Alex Ferreira from Dominican Republic, and Daniela Spalla from Argentina were encouraged to make them their own.

Uncertainty, as might be apparent by now, is as much a part of Gepe’s creative process as writing lyrics or finding a melody. He seems as happy talking about the process of making songs as he is about the finished songs themselves. Perhaps even more.

“I like throwing the stone as far as possible and seeing what happens,” he explains. “Sometimes those combinations work, and sometimes they don’t. But I am interested in finding those answers.”

ORO, in that sense, is the ultimate experiment, a confrontation between the Gepe of old and the Gepe of now to see who gets the final say on what these songs really are. And in true Gepe fashion, he gave himself one more constraint: to work from memory.

“I didn’t listen to the original songs,” he explains. “There are actually a lot of parts of the lyrics on these ORO versions that aren’t the right ones. I’d say that on most of them there are phrases that changed, words that changed, because I sang what I remembered. So it became, how can I put it, a kind of portrait of each of the songs drawn from memory.”

The result is an album that seems to exist in a strange space between past and present, where familiar songs retain just enough of their original identity while opening themselves up to entirely new possibilities.

On “Hablar de Ti,” Silvana Estrada took that idea almost literally, choosing the song herself before arriving in Santiago and singing the entire thing. “In the end, I had to find a space for myself inside the vocal arrangement Silvana had created,” Gepe recalls. Daniela Spalla helped steer “Invierno” toward a chachachá while Mexican duo Daniel, Me Estás Matando helped transform the reggae-tinged pulse of “Ser Amigos” into their signature “bolero glam.”

“Por la Ventana,” featuring Alex Ferreira, presented a different challenge altogether. Gepe quickly discovered that the song’s repetitive rhythmic loop was too essential to its identity to leave behind. Instead, the new arrangement bends slightly toward afropop and adds “La Pastilla,” a new coda conceived as a conversation with the song that came before it.

Then there’s “Fruta y Té,” arguably the song in his discography with the most to lose. A signature hit in Chile, it nearly didn’t make the album at all after an initial reworking failed to excite him. A last-minute dive into Peruvian chicha, the psychedelic, electric-guitar-driven strain of cumbia that emerged in the late ’60s, prompted Gepe and producer Julián Bernal to scrap what they had and start over, eventually bringing in 20-year-old Chilean cumbia-ranchera singer Alanys Lagos and an accordion player from her band.

With ORO now under wraps, Gepe has to take the album out of the studio, returning to the road after an extended break from performing. The prospect brings with it some apprehension for an artist who admits he’s most comfortable spending his time experimenting in the recording studio. Still, he sees the stage as an essential counterpart to that process. “I’ve always said, and I still believe, that playing live is the essence of being an artist,” he says. “You have to defend your songs and your records live.”

As for what comes after ORO, Gepe might find himself looking even further into the past. Lately, he has been quietly digging into Chilean folklore and the sounds that have long provided some of his deepest inspiration, less with a specific album in mind than out of curiosity about where they might lead him next.

“I’m digging around here and there to see what I can find, and I’ve found beautiful things,” he says. “I’d say I’m studying more than I’m writing songs. Studying sounds, you could say.”

After spending so much time discovering what remains of his own songs decades later, perhaps the next experiment is finding out what remains to be discovered in everyone else’s.