MARION SOSA OF MARION RAW
Music means many different things to many different people. For some it is an enjoyable background accompaniment to their daily lives, for others it is their creative outlet, a form of processing the world and outward expressions of that filtration but for Marion Raw it is that and so much more. Music is a survival tool and a method of fending for oneself in the face of a chaotic and unstable world. The musical armoury from which Marion has equipped herself over the course of her life has provided not just a sense of safety and solace but a private world. One that she now shares through her debut record Deep Cuts which has the earliest of beginnings.
Emigrating from Mexico to America at an early age travelling with her beauty queen mother, Marion’s earliest recollections of travelling and moving between countries and cultures reads like a shopping list: “Cardboard boxes, suitcases, my Walkman, a sleeping bag shaped like a bear, club sandwiches and room service.” Living between airports and hotel rooms as she did makes it is no surprise that early memories consist of “the perfectly polished airports and their consistently friendly flight attendants and all the magical worlds we would construct with cardboard boxes.” By age twelve Marion had already moved a staggering twenty two times with her mother and during this time she found a sense of familiarity within the impermanence of rapid change as she acceptingly states “I guess it was just part of it. I knew not to question it and took it one day at a time, I became very good at adapting and to my mother’s credit, at least the places we went to were always incredible, so the sense of adventure was the fun part.”
From this point and through to her teenage years, what was developing within Marion would ultimately lead to a career in music because of the support, significance and certainty it provided. “My childhood was definitely a short lived one, and during the hardest moments I would find great solace in the fantasy of one day living a big and full life, where all the pain and suffering would serve a purpose. Along with feeling the safest when I was alone and in my own little world with music. It became the reason to keep going. As life became harder, my dreams became larger and as much as I love all the arts, nothing has ever felt as empty and painful as the period in my life when I wasn’t making music. Until the fear of preforming paled in comparison to the anxiety of not fulfilling that calling. And quite late in the game as far as music is concerned, twenty eight, I shifted careers and started over. Music has been it ever since.”
Music as her bedrock, other creative talents surged within and the artistic pursuits Marion enjoyed gained recognition from the wider community and in particular the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) for her work entitled Mummy Dearest. The piece centred on mental health and gender, a work so highly praised she received a scholarship. Showing her diversity as a multi-disciplinary artist, it is a curious thought as to how much of this work was for Marion a cathartic process and if she reconciles life’s struggles through art? “I think I am an artist as a coping mechanism, I never really felt I had a choice in the matter. So everything I have ever been drawn to and explored stems from a deep necessity and curiosity to understand the world I live in.” With such fundamental importance it is small wonder art and music would be so inexplicably bound together that for Marion. “The creative process is visceral and completely intuitive. I don’t think I have ever found deep meaning when I am self-aware or creating from a different place. I don’t experience art in a rational way. Any logic or discourse is secondary and many times I understand what I am doing after the fact. It’s like the after math of a crash. I first feel it, I analyse it, and then I understand it.” That hindsight and self-reflection can also be applied to her musical endeavours as is evident from the time Marion spent performing in her earliest outfit Love La Femme. A Spanish duo that that for Marion “was one of the biggest learning curves of my professional life. And although I am grateful for it, I also realised that for me less is more. Essentially all I ever wanted was to somehow recreate what I do musically and creatively at home when I am on my own and share it with people. Having a band really helped shine a light on how to do that on my own. Because Love La Femme was everything but simple and under produced. I shared the stage with some incredible musicians that also helped me mature and grow on stage and along the way. I appreciate how this all allowed me to eventually find the way back to myself.” This however wouldn’t be the last time music, friends and family would bring Marion back to herself and to her origins.
Stuck in lockdown “it quickly became evident that life was at a standstill until further notice, and once I moved past the initial shock and fear, I started to go back to basics. And this took shape in the form of revisiting songs that had always meant something to me. The Mexico I grew up with in my imagination was the Mexico of my parents’ generation. I adopted their nostalgia and references never having had any of my own. So songs like Los Barandales del Puente was a song for example that I had never actually heard but it was always being referenced to by my father, like a long lost family member. So out of sheer curiosity I decided to look up the song and to my surprise it opened up echoes of my childhood and adolescence and helped me find my voice in Spanish.” That immutable and deep connection to ones heritage runs like a seam and whether it is from discovering tracks her father spoke of, her time in Love La Femme or in her current incarnation as Marion Raw, the thread that ties it together is that of music. This is why her solo record Deep Cuts needed to be made and as Marion so eloquently puts it “the story I wanted to convey with this album was through sound, texture and language, taking the listener along the story of my life, the story of migrating. The colours of my parent’s Veracruz, where they are both originally from, along with the crossing to the US, starting in California, then down and across to Texas, eventually crossing the Atlantic to Europe. I found it most fitting to debut by telling the story of my life and creating a time capsule of sorts.” A story that is now firmly encapsulated by her album which stands testament to Marion’s unique tale that can be shared through the common dominator of music. Making it no surprise that the record features a mix of originals works, cover songs and tracks performed in both English and Spanish.
To understand Marion’s approach in pairing suitably apt instrumentation and her methodology towards crafting the music on Deep Cuts, there is often a deliberate and direct approach and other times it is a mix of fate and fortune as Marion describes. “In the same way in which time was appearing to stand still, during the recording, the choices were all made based on what was available. Quarantined equipment and gear so to speak and recording at home. I had to step away from any sense of perfectionism as we were recording directly onto a 4 track Tascam that had been sitting in my closet for about fifteen years without any maintenance. It had tons of issues but we got it working, and I admit there were times where letting go of a polished result and forfeiting to the Polaroid moment, proved crisis worthy. Collaborating with AJ Davila, who produced Deep Cuts, also allowed for both our fears and confabulations about the pandemic and a dystopian future to take shape in the form of broadcasts and sound bites that we wove into the album. We talked and imagined what it would be like if the world as we knew it were to truly end and someone, from a not so distant future civilisation, was to find this dusty old tape recording.”
A state in time, an atmosphere and sentiment that will forever be crystallised on the record and a feeling that can be globally appreciated by those who listen to the album but something which is outside the awareness of the naive listener is that of the record itself. This is for Marion “the space between songs. The outtakes that I never thought anyone would ever hear. Many of the original songs on the album were moments in between songs, either improvising or just waiting for AJ to finishing setting up. I believe that’s where a producer’s talent lies, in the ability to listen when nobody else is.” With the deft touch of AJ and a sensitive awareness to capture those intimate moments in the recording studio, what is ultimately laid down on tape is a private snapshot of Marion in her own world just as she has always had her own private world in which to live, create and share.
Out of the studio and working on the single video clips for the album, Marion created four wholly unrelated clips, each as different as each other. Indicative of the album itself in its eclectic array of sounds, atmospheres and subject matter, it is another sign of that creative force that captured the attention of FONCA many years earlier. There are some strong and suggestive concepts throughout the various clips. A sexuality in Hideaway, a dusty portrait in Run with The Sea, psychedelic kaleidoscope of karaoke in Si No Te Hubieras Ido and the stripped back version and voyeuristic clip for If I Could Turn Back Time. Standalone clips and concepts they maybe but each share only one orbit. “I feel like in all these instances the uniting narrative is well… me! The autobiographical element but also the fantasy. They are their own thing in that the things that people bring forth when collaborating are unique and always different. And in the end since my aim is to tell a story, each song holds its own tale, colour palette and character. If I Could Turn Back Time, caters to a more nostalgic side and the parts of the past that haunt me. So in a subtle way, it’s a ghost story. Si No Te Hubieras Ido, heartbroken alone in a shitty karaoke bar, I mean it’s pretty self-explanatory and Run with the sea, is a portrait. I love this video. And Hideaway is irreverent and sexual but also humorous.
Through everything Marion creates there is a pure sense of sincerity and we have been allowed to lean in a little, peer through the view finder and delve into her world. A world that has served to help and shield her from all that is bad which until now has remained a realm exclusively of her own but has since been opened and shared with the community. A life’s tale laid down on tape and Deep Cuts is a record that is as unique as it is highly relatable and one that deserves to be heard.
