Sebastián Valdivieso understands music as a living territory where silence, memory, and roots converse with human transformation.
Speaking with Sebastián creates a feeling that is difficult to explain from the very first moment. Our conversation does not unfold like a conventional interview about composition or artistic trajectory. Instead, it moves like a journey through an inner landscape where migratory birds, roots, death, silence, community, and tradition emerge.
In the way he speaks, Sebastián Valdivieso makes music stop feeling like an industry. It becomes an ecosystem.
Perhaps that is why many of his answers drift away from the logic of productivity that dominates much of today’s artistic world.
I realized that Sebastián does not speak about positioning, trends, or visibility. He speaks about silence as creative material. About Bambuco as a place of belonging. About art as a tool for confronting fear rather than anesthetizing it.
In his artistic vision, Sebastián Valdivieso transforms music into an emotional territory where silence and memory function as forms of cultural resistance.
And in the middle of an era obsessed with noise, that position feels almost radical.
Silence as Living Matter in Sebastián Valdivieso
Every conversation with Sebastián seems to begin before words. There is a pause beforehand, a kind of slow breathing that organizes the meaning of everything that comes afterward.
For that very reason, before speaking about songs, he needs to speak about silence. He does not understand it as an absence. Nor as emptiness. For him, silence functions as a living material upon which creation is sculpted.
Just as a sculptor observes a block of marble and visualizes forms within it, our material as musicians is silence. – Sebastían Valdivieso –
The image completely changes the way one thinks about music. Because in his creative universe, songs do not appear to fill emptiness. They emerge after learning how to listen to it.
As he spoke, with a melodic, gentle, and intimate voice, it became impossible not to think about how strange it seems to defend silence in an age where everything constantly competes for attention. Social media, platforms, algorithms, and immediate content. Everything appears designed to accelerate emotional consumption.
And yet Sebastián composes from another place. One that is much slower, contemplative, and profoundly human. Perhaps that is why his songs do not seem to be trying to impress. They seem to be trying to tell the truth.
And precisely that search for honesty inevitably opens another question: how can authenticity survive in an era that demands constant speed?
The Emotional Speed of an Exhausted Era
In a present dominated by immediacy, speaking about contemplation can seem almost like an act of resistance. Still, Sebastián does not completely reject speed. What he questions is the superficiality with which we often associate it.
One of the most interesting moments of the conversation emerged when discussing Instant Songs, a project built through improvisation and immediate creation.
The idea might seem contradictory within a body of work so deeply connected to contemplation. But Sebastián quickly dismantles that apparent opposition.
“Speed does not mean superficiality,” he explains. “An instant song does not take five minutes. What takes years is building the ability to create it.”
Behind that agility lies a silent accumulation of experience, study, and emotional maturation. The immediate does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from a sensitivity trained over a long period of time.
At this point, something important appears regarding our contemporary relationship with art. Today, we live in a culture that rewards quick reactions, constant exposure, and endless production.
Very often, the value of a work seems to depend more on its ability to circulate than on its ability to remain in memory. The algorithm — absurd as it may be — demands constant presence, constant novelty, constant visibility. And within that logic, art risks becoming just another form of accelerated consumption.
But contemporary artistic experience has also begun to fragment. The reality is that we listen to songs while doing other things. We consume images in seconds, rapidly moving from one emotion to another without staying too long in any of them. Amid that permanent speed, silence, contemplation, and deep listening begin to feel almost out of time.
Yet Sebastián insists on another idea: even what appears spontaneous must first have passed through a long process of inner listening.
As if improvising were not about accelerating thought, but about allowing the unconscious to finally find a way to speak.
And within that opening toward the unconscious, another much more uncomfortable dimension of the creative process also appears: confrontation with oneself.
Art as Confrontation in Sebastián Valdivieso’s Work
As the conversation progresses, it becomes evident that Sebastián does not understand art as light entertainment. In his vision, creating means entering emotionally uncomfortable territories.
Long before becoming an industry, content, or cultural product, art functioned as a way of interpreting the world. It was a way of giving meaning to fear, death, desire, spirituality, and everything impossible to explain rationally.
We must remember that the first cave paintings, ritual chants, ceremonial dances, and oral traditions were not born solely to entertain. They emerged so people could connect with something deeper than themselves: collective memory, nature, loss, the sacred, or survival.
Perhaps that is why art remains one of the few places where human beings can still confront themselves emotionally without needing to resolve everything immediately.
There is something uncomfortable and profoundly honest in the way Sebastián speaks about creating. He never presents art as an easy refuge. Nor as a romantic escape route.
For him, creating means confronting.
Creating means confronting what we truly are.
That phrase runs through all of his work. Music then appears not as an emotional sedative, but as a tool for looking directly at what we usually try to avoid: fear, grief, transformation, and death.
In one of the most powerful moments of the conversation, Sebastián describes much of contemporary music as “auditory paracetamol.” Something designed to accompany disconnection instead of provoking awareness.
The phrase lingers with me. Because it points to something we often intuit but rarely name: some music no longer seeks to move people emotionally or politically. It seeks to anesthetize them.
Against that, Sebastián proposes another possibility. A music that does not evade pain, but sits in front of it. That does not try to hide human discomfort, but moves through it.
Migrating Also Transforms Sonic Identity
Images of migratory birds constantly move through Sebastián’s creative universe. They do not appear merely as poetic symbols. They function as a way of understanding identity, movement, and human transformation.
Flights, displacements, mountains, and journeys emerge throughout his songs. But movement in his work does not function solely as an aesthetic metaphor. It also speaks to something profoundly contemporary: the experience of migration.
And perhaps that experience now occupies a central place within Latin American identity.
Over the last few decades, millions of people have left Latin America searching for economic stability, work opportunities, or simply a different possibility for the future.
Colombia is deeply part of that migratory history. For years, violence, inequality, political instability, and economic crises pushed entire generations to rebuild their lives outside the country.
Spain became one of the main destinations for the Colombian and Latin American diaspora. The shared language facilitated many processes, but it never completely erased the feeling of displacement. Because migrating does not simply mean changing territories. It also means renegotiating identity, language, memory, and the way one relates to oneself.
In cities like Barcelona, different migratory layers coexist constantly: Latin Americans, Arab communities, Africans, Asians, and Europeans displaced by other crises. The migrant experience then stops being an exception and becomes part of Europe’s everyday landscape.
But even within that diversity, there is something particularly complex about the experience of migrant artists.
How does one preserve one’s own voice far from the territory that shaped it?
How does a tradition transform without completely losing the connection to what originally gave it life?
Those questions silently move through the entire conversation with Sebastián.
When asked what he has had to leave behind to become the artist he is today, he responds with something unexpected: “I think I’ve had to leave everything behind. And at the same time, have everything ahead of me.”
The answer immediately recalls the logic of the migratory birds that repeatedly appear in his artistic imagery. They do not migrate out of whim. They migrate because something within them knows how to read an invisible direction.
And perhaps there lies one of the most powerful images in all of his work: migration not as absolute rupture, but as another form of listening.
Sebastián seems to understand creation through that same intuition. Not as a completely controlled rational strategy, but as a constant listening toward that which still has no name.
Because when a person migrates, the way they listen to the world also changes. Territory stops being merely geography and begins to become sonic memory. A voicerhythm. A cadence. An instrument that preserves something of the place that is no longer physically present.
But migration also forces one to observe the origin from another distance. And that distance often reveals cultural tensions that previously seemed invisible.
In Sebastián’s case, living in Europe not only transformed his emotional relationship with Colombia and Andean music. It also deepened questions about cultural legitimacy, coloniality, and artistic belonging.
Because for many Latin American artists, arriving in Europe inevitably means confronting an uncomfortable question: who historically decided which forms of music deserved to be considered universal and which were reduced to the category of folklore?
Sebastián Valdivieso, Barcelona, and Cultural Disobedience
Speaking about Europe within the conversation with Sebastián does not lead toward the romantic idea of the “cultural center” that occupied the European imagination in Latin America for so long. What appears instead is a much more complex reflection on power, cultural legitimacy, and historical memory.
Sebastián’s experience in Barcelona deepened questions that had already been silently accompanying his work long before migrating.
Everything must be said clearly: for many Latin American artists, arriving in Europe does not simply mean changing countries. It also means coming face to face with a cultural history that for centuries decided which forms of music should be considered “universal,” which forms of knowledge deserved academic recognition, and which traditions would remain reduced to the category of folklore, the peripheral, or the exotic.
The conversation changes dimension when this subject emerges.
Sebastián speaks from his experience within music academia and clearly describes something that still crosses much of artistic education in Latin America: the persistence of a deeply Eurocentric perspective.
For decades, conservatories, universities, and musical training spaces reproduced the idea that Western harmony represented the highest point of musical development. Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy, or Bach appeared as inevitable references of sophistication, while Latin American music was often treated as minor, popular, or regional expression.
That hierarchy affects not only music theory. It also transforms the way many artists perceive themselves.
Because growing up within educational systems where Europe constantly appears as the legitimate cultural center produces a silent consequence: the permanent need for validation.
Sebastián seems to have identified that tension with remarkable clarity.
That is why he speaks about the need to “decolonize composition, decolonize harmony, and decolonize singing.”
The phrase does not function solely as a political stance. It also works as an existential search. A way of asking from where one creates and for whom one creates.
And perhaps that is where something especially interesting about his experience in Barcelona appears: the city is never romanticized.
Barcelona is not described as an idealized European postcard nor as an automatic symbol of cultural sophistication. It appears instead as a deeply complex territory. A city where cultural richness, identity tensions, mass migration, and the historical wounds of colonization coexist.
“Barcelona breathes the West, but it also breathes the wound of the colony,” he explains.
The phrase is especially powerful because it dismantles an idea still deeply present within the Latin American imagination: the notion of Europe as a completely resolved or culturally homogeneous space.
Barcelona, like so many other cities, lives crossed by constant debates about identity, language, historical memory, and belonging. Added to that is a profoundly diverse reality shaped by migrant communities from North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and different regions of Asia.
Within that complex fabric, Sebastián finds something especially valuable: another way of understanding cultural identity.
Not as a fixed or closed idea, nor as a rigid defense of one’s own, but as something alive, changing, crossed by mixtures, displacement, and new forms of coexistence.
Migrating to Europe did not distance him from Colombian music. It produced the opposite effect. Distance seemed to intensify his relationship with his roots.
But no longer through nostalgia.
Instead, through a much more conscious understanding of their political, symbolic, and emotional value.
Because living far away also forces one to ask which parts of oneself remain intact when the territory around you changes.
And in Sebastián’s case, one of those permanences seems to be Colombian Andean music.
Not as a folkloric object frozen in time. Not as a tourist symbol of national identity. But as a living language capable of transforming without completely losing its memory.
Perhaps that is why his work constantly avoids falling into the romantic idea of “preserving” traditions as if they were museum pieces.
What interests him is not keeping the past intact. It is keeping alive the human impulse that originally gave birth to it.
And within that cultural reaffirmation, bambuco occupies an especially intimate place.
Bambuco as a Place of Belonging for Sebastián Valdivieso
There is a particular moment in the conversation where music stops functioning solely as artistic expression and begins to feel like refuge, memory, and community all at once.
When Sebastián speaks about bambuco, it no longer feels as though he is describing merely a musical genre. He speaks about an emotional territory. A space where certain memories still find a way to remain alive.
And it is no coincidence. Bambuco occupies a profoundly important place within Colombian cultural history. Born in the Andean region during the nineteenth century, the genre emerged from the encounter between Indigenous traditions, African heritage, and European musical structures. That mixture, so characteristic of Latin America, made bambuco a hybrid expression from its very origins.
For decades, bambuco was one of Colombia’s most representative musical forms. In Andean towns, family gatherings, and popular celebrations, it functioned as a kind of shared language. Its guitars, tiples, and bandolas accompanied stories of love, migration, landscape, and collective memory.
Beyond music itself, the genre helped construct an idea of national identity during moments when the country was still trying to define itself culturally. As happened with many Latin American rhythms, bambuco became a way of narrating territory, emotions, and the social tensions of an era.
However, that tradition never remained still. Over time, bambuco underwent profound transformations. It moved from rural and popular interpretations to academic stages and institutional festivals. Later, new generations began blending it with jazz, contemporary music, and much broader sonic explorations.
That evolution was not always comfortable. As happens with many traditional musical forms, debates emerged about authenticity, preservation, and change. For some, transforming bambuco meant losing it. For others, it was precisely the only way to keep it alive.
And that is exactly where one of the most important reflections of the conversation with Sebastián begins. Because bambuco survives not only because of its musical structures or historical value, but because of the capacity it still has to generate belonging.
A Place Where Memory Still Breathes
All of that history of transformation ultimately leads to something much more intimate. Because behind the debates about tradition, modernization, or cultural preservation, a much more human question emerges: what truly remains within a community when everything around it changes?
In the conversation with Sebastián, the answer never comes from theory. It comes from the emotional experience that still inhabits music. From the sensation of belonging to something that continues breathing even through time, distance, and new generations.
During the interview, a fundamental question emerges: how can a tradition be preserved without freezing it?
The answer appears through a powerful image. Living roots do not remain motionless. They change, breathe, and expand toward other places.
For Sebastián, preserving tradition does not mean repeating the past exactly or reconstructing it with absolute obedience. It means keeping alive the emotional and human necessity that gave birth to that music. The collective force that turned bambuco into a language of encounter, grief, celebration, and belonging.
For me, Bambuco is a place where my community and I are unforgettable.
The phrase completely transforms the conversation. Because it is no longer only about music or cultural identity understood through folklore. It becomes about permanence. About existing within a collective memory that still breathes even amid displacement, migration, and the passage of time.
Laura Viera A: Did migration transform your relationship with Colombia and Andean music? How did it happen? What changed?
Sebastián Valdivieso: Migration changed my perspective a lot because, in the end, I come from a migrant culture, and much of my country’s culture comes from migration. Our musicality was born as a response to territory and the process of colonization. Feeling foreign made me feel more connected to my music — to how it emerged and why.
There is also something profoundly Latin American in that idea. Many of the continent’s traditional genres have historically functioned as spaces of emotional resistance. Places where entire communities preserved ways of narrating themselves in the face of violence, modernization, or cultural erasure.
In that sense, the bambuco Sebastián describes belongs not only to Colombia’s past. It also belongs to the present of those who continue searching for ways to recognize themselves within an increasingly fragmented world.
That idea of living community also explains the way Sebastián observes the contemporary music industry. For him, the problem is not the transformation of music but the speed at which certain cultural dynamics turn everything into immediate and forgettable consumption.
Against that, bambuco appears almost like a gesture of intimate resistance: a music that still demands listening, memory, and shared time.
A Native Forest Against the Monoculture
When the conversation reaches the subject of the music industry, the tone shifts once again. Sebastián Valdivieso does not respond from resentment or nostalgia. Instead, he responds through an ecological metaphor.
Toward the end of the conversation, one of the most powerful images in all of his work emerges. When the topic of the music industry comes up, Sebastián explains that he has never fully felt that he belongs to it. Rather, he prefers to think of his work as part of a native forest.
The difference, he says, is profound.
The industry often functions like a monoculture: constant productivity, repetition of formulas, speed, performance, and numbers.
A native forest, on the other hand, is sustained through diversity, interactions, and the balance between different forms of existence. No species completely dominates the others. Instead, everything coexists within a much more complex and organic network.
The metaphor does not emerge merely as a critique of the contemporary music market. It also functions as a way of understanding what is happening today with certain traditional forms of music within the global industry.
For years, much of the Latin American music industry privileged genres capable of circulating quickly within international commercial dynamics: Latin pop, reggaetón, urban music, and certain more globalized versions of tropical music.
Consequently, in Colombia, many sounds associated with the Andes, rural life, or folklore were relegated to institutional, academic, or heritage spaces, while more easily exportable music occupied the center of the cultural conversation.
And yet Andean music was never a minor language. In fact, more than a single genre, it represents a deeply diverse sonic universe that stretches across different countries and territories throughout Latin America.
In Colombia, expressions such as bambuco, pasillo, guabina, and torbellino accompanied everyday life, celebrations, displacement, and ways of inhabiting the Andean landscape for generations.
Their instruments — the tiple, bandola, and guitar — build an intimate and territorial sound. A music where there still seems to be room for silence, contemplation, and shared memory.
But perhaps what matters most is not only the sound itself. These musical forms also preserved ways of understanding community, transmitting affection, and narrating collective experiences across time.
And although they were often presented as “traditional” expressions tied only to the past, they never stopped transforming. Today, they continue evolving through new generations of artists who blend them with jazz, electronic music, improvisation, or contemporary composition, without losing the emotional connection that gave them origin.
The problem, however, is not solely commercial. It also has to do with the way the market conditions listening itself. Music stops being perceived as a shared experience and begins to be consumed through immediacy, algorithms, and the endless circulation of novelty.
As a result, musical forms like bambuco become trapped in an uncomfortable contradiction. On one hand, they are celebrated as important parts of Colombian cultural identity. On the other hand, they are often treated as static pieces disconnected from contemporary sensibility.
Sebastián Valdivieso seems to resist precisely that idea.
In his vision, Andean music does not need to become a relic to preserve depth. Nor does it need to disguise itself completely as commercial music to survive. Instead, what matters is allowing it to continue evolving without losing the communal and human dimension that gave it its origin.
That is why Sebastián Valdivieso’s work does not feel built from accumulation or from the logic of constant visibility that dominates much of the current industry. Rather, there is something much more patient in his way of creating. Something closer to care than productivity.
The image of the native forest ultimately reorganizes the entire interview. Because of this, it also explains the way Sebastián Valdivieso understands tradition, community, and artistic sensibility.
In a forest, invisible connections matter just as much as visible ones. Roots sustain one another beneath the soil. Growth happens unevenly, slowly, and collectively. And perhaps there lies a fundamental difference from monoculture: diversity is not an obstacle to survival, but precisely what makes survival possible.
That idea runs through the entire conversation with Sebastián Valdivieso. Even when he speaks about the future, there is never the fantasy of completely breaking with the past. Nor is there the need to preserve traditions intact forever.
Instead, the future appears as an organic continuity. A slow transformation where memory still finds new ways to breathe.
The Living Memory of Andean Music
And yet, Andean music was never a minor language. In fact, more than a single genre, it represents a deeply diverse sonic universe that stretches across different countries and territories throughout Latin America.
In Colombia, expressions such as bambuco, pasillo, guabina, and torbellino accompanied everyday life, celebrations, displacement, and ways of inhabiting the Andean landscape for generations.
Their instruments — the tiple, bandola, and guitar — build an intimate and territorial sound. A music where there still seems to be room for silence, contemplation, and shared memory.
But perhaps what matters most is not only the sound itself. These musical forms also preserved ways of understanding community, transmitting affection, and narrating collective experiences across time.
For years, much of the Latin American music industry privileged genres capable of circulating quickly within international commercial dynamics: Latin pop, reggaetón, urban music, and certain more globalized versions of tropical music.
Consequently, in Colombia, many sounds associated with the Andes, rural life, or folklore were relegated to institutional, academic, or heritage spaces, while more easily exportable music occupied the center of the cultural conversation.
And although these expressions were often presented as “traditional” forms tied only to the past, they never stopped transforming. Today, they continue evolving through new generations of artists who blend them with jazz, electronic music, improvisation, or contemporary music, without losing the emotional connection that gave them origin.
The image of the native forest ultimately reorganizes the entire interview. Because of this, it also explains the way Sebastián Valdivieso understands tradition, community, and artistic sensibility.
In a forest, invisible connections matter just as much as visible ones. Roots sustain one another beneath the soil. Growth happens unevenly, slowly, and collectively.
And perhaps there lies a fundamental difference from monoculture: diversity is not an obstacle to survival, but precisely what makes survival possible.
That idea runs through the entire conversation with Sebastián Valdivieso. Even when he speaks about the future, the fantasy of completely breaking with the past never appears. Nor does the need to preserve traditions in an untouched state.
Instead, the future appears as an organic continuity. A slow transformation where memory still finds new ways to breathe.
What Still Grows
Toward the end of the conversation, all the images that had appeared earlier — roots, birds, forest, silence — begin to gather into a single idea: constant transformation. Gradually, each metaphor folds into the next, creating a quiet sense of continuity.
There is, however, a final moment that lingers long after the conversation ends.
Laura Viera A: When you look toward the future, do you still imagine yourself defending your roots, or do you think you will need to break away from them?
Sebastián smiles before answering.
Sebastián Valdivieso: “I am not only roots. I am also stem, flower, seed.”
And perhaps therein lies the best way to understand his work. Not as an attempt to preserve the past intact, nor as a complete rupture from it. Instead, his art exists as a living form of transformation, constantly moving between memory and reinvention.
In Sebastián Valdivieso’s work, roots do not function as anchors. Rather, they behave like a nervous system — something that continues growing underground while the world accelerates above it. As a result, his music feels connected to time in a different way.
Perhaps that is why his work does not fully belong to the logic of the industry. Instead, it belongs to something more organic. Slower. More vulnerable. Consequently, listening to his music often feels less like consumption and more like entering a landscape.
Something resembling a native forest.
A place where memory still breathes.
Conclusion: Sebastián Valdivieso and the Art of Feeling Again
Listening to Sebastián Valdivieso forces us to rethink many ideas surrounding contemporary art. In a cultural context dominated by speed, hyperexposure, and immediate consumption, his work insists on another direction. One that feels slower, more vulnerable, and profoundly human.
His music does not seem built to fill empty spaces or produce momentary distraction. Instead, it functions as an invitation to confront what we usually avoid: silence, memory, fear, roots, and transformation. Through that invitation, the listener becomes part of the experience rather than merely observing it.
Perhaps that is why it becomes difficult to speak about Sebastián solely as a musician. His work moves within a broader territory where creation functions simultaneously as existence, resistance, and belonging. Moreover, his artistic language suggests that vulnerability itself can become a form of strength.
Sebastián Valdivieso’s work consistently returns to one essential idea: creating can also be a way of remaining human amid contemporary noise. And perhaps that is where the deepest force of his work resides. Not in spectacle, nor in permanence, but in its ability to remind us that there are still artists creating not to anesthetize the world, but to help it feel again.
