Music washere first.
Before LOON HQ.Before the cameras.Before the stories.There was music.
01 Origin
Before
me
- Santiago de Cuba20.02° N / 75.82° W
- Guantanamo20.14° N / 75.21° W
Music didn’t start with me. It was already in the family.
My parents were born in Cuba. My mother was born and raised in Guantanamo. My father came from Santiago de Cuba, and music was his world.
He wasn’t just
a musician.
- He wrote songs.
- He sang.
- He arranged music.
- He played instruments.
- He led a 16-piece orchestra.
The easiest way I know how to describe him is
Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey rolled into one Cuban entertainer.
He had talent, confidence, swagger and absolutely no problem thinking big.
Same eraSame Cuban music world
He performed during the same era and in the same Cuban music world as names like
- Benny More
- Celia Cruz
- Olga Guillot
- Elena Burke
That ability to hear something in your head before it exists, build it from nothing and make it bigger than anybody expected…
That’s the part of him I recognize in myself.
02 Family
The other lesson
But I learned something else from my father too.
When my parents came to the United States, the man who had once commanded stages and orchestras couldn’t find his place anymore.
He lost his confidence.
Then he lost himself.
His disappointment followed him home, and eventually he walked away from our family when I was six years old.
I didn’t see him again for seventeen years.
By then I was in my early twenties.
The man I remembered seemed gone. He was living alone in a small rental surrounded by the instruments that were still with him when almost everything else wasn’t.
I thought there would be another conversation.
Another visit.
Maybe a chance to fix some of what had been broken.
There wasn’t.
He died by suicide before that could happen.
For a long time, there were things about my father I couldn’t understand.
Eventually I realized he had left me two very different lessons.
One came from watching what he could do.
The other came from watching what happened when he stopped believing he could do it.
I kept both.
I will never let where I am decide where I can go.
That became one of the rules of my life.
03 South Florida
$300
and a plan
By fifteen, I wanted in.
South Florida already had DJs everywhere. Hip Hop was exploding. Latin Freestyle was everywhere. Everybody knew somebody who DJ’d.
I didn’t care.
I was going to do it anyway.
I was working part-time at Burger King and saving whatever I could for equipment.
The first piece came from family friends in Miami.
A beat-up Radio Shack Realistic mixer.
It wasn’t much.
But now I had the first piece.
I needed two pitch-control turntables, an amp and speakers.
Technics 1200s were around $500 each.
That wasn’t happening.
Then somebody introduced me to a bedroom DJ trying to buy his second 1200.
He needed $300.
I had $300.
He had two Pioneer PL-4 direct-drive turntables and an amp.
Now we had something to talk about.
He got his $300.
I walked out with both Pioneers and the amp.
Speakers?
Those belonged to my older sister.
She just didn’t know she was part of the business yet.
I’d borrow the speakers from her Fisher stereo while she was at work, DJ with them, reconnect everything and have them back where they belonged before she got home.
You work with what you’ve got.
He needed $300.
I needed a DJ rig.
We made a deal.
04 The crew
Once I could mix without chasing the beat all over the place, I went back to the same guy who sold me the equipment.
I had another proposition.
Let’s join forces.
I called usDJs In Effect.
I needed a DJ name too.
That’s whenCora Zonewas born.
He was quiet.
I wasn’t.
So I became the hustler.
And I knew something even then that I still believe today.
If nobody knows you exist, being good isn’t enough.
We needed people talking.
And I wasn’t interested in waiting for that to happen.
The block party
- One street.City Hall / my older sister came with me
- $60 permit.Everybody on the block signed off
- 200+ flyers.Drawn by me / photocopied / Publix parking lot
- $5 at the barricade.Soda and snacks included
- One Saturday night.7 PM until 11 PM
DJs In Effect presentsThe block party
It was the last month of summer vacation.
I asked my older sister to come with me to City Hall.
For $60, I could shut down an entire street for a block party as long as everybody living on the block signed off on it.
Everybody did.
Now I had a date.
I ordered glossy black business cards with gold trim and an embossed turntable.
My home phone number was printed right on them.
Then I bought an answering machine.
Not because people were calling.
They weren’t.
I bought it because I expected them to.
A week before the party, I drew the flyer myself and made more than 200 copies.
I put them on cars in the Publix parking lot where I was working as a bag boy.
Neighbors took stacks to their jobs.
I paid four football players $20 each to work the ends of the street.
Admission was five bucks.
Soda and snacks included.
DJs In
Effect
Cora Zone
Home
Then Saturday came.
And everybody
showed up.
We went from 7 PM until 11 PM without a problem.
We made more money that night than I’d ever seen sitting in one place.
Monday came.
We started handing out those business cards at school.
Then the answering machine started filling up.
- Birthdays.
- Quinceaneras.
- Weddings.
- House parties.
- Events.
- More parties.
- More calls.
Within six months, DJs In Effect had become one of the most in-demand DJ crews in our part of South Florida.
I didn’t know the words
- “Brand activation.”
- “Customer acquisition.”
- “Marketing funnel.”
I knew how to
make noise.
And I knew how to turn attention into work.
05 Nightclubs
CoraZone
From house parties to house music.
The partnership eventually ended.
His family wanted him focused on school.
I wasn’t finished.
Not even close.
A friend of a friend had a residency at one of the biggest clubs in Miami.
He heard one of my House mixes.
Then came the question that changed everything.
“Can you fill in for me?”
Two Saturdays. That’s what it was supposed to be.
Two Saturdays became an 18-hour marathon set.
Then another weekend.
Then another.
The birthday parties and weddings disappeared.
The clubs took over.
Then came the raves.
Then came DJs from places I’d never been.
One of the club owners had a stake in a club in Ibiza.
At the time, I didn’t know what Ibiza was.
I learned fast.
06 The world
Miami wasn’t the end of the map.
Suddenly I was meeting DJs from all over the world.
Some of the people I met during those years would eventually become some of the highest-paid DJs on the planet.
One of them showed me FL Studio.
Then he told me:
“This is where the money’s at.”
That changed the way I looked at music.
Until then, I had spent years controlling records other people created.
Now I could create the record.
I started producing.
- House.
- Techno.
- Electronic music.
And I never stopped using FL Studio.
Residencies eventually took me through Miami, Ibiza, Dubai and Rio de Janeiro.
- Residency 01Miami25.76° N / 80.19° W
- Residency 02Ibiza38.91° N / 1.43° E
- Residency 03Dubai25.20° N / 55.27° E
- Residency 04Rio de Janeiro22.91° S / 43.17° W
It was a hell
of a run.
But music wasn’t finished changing on me.
07 Scoring
The music
changed.
Years later, I came back to writing and drawing my supernatural stories.
And something happened.
The more I wrote, the more I heard them.
Not songs.
Timecode inCueType
- 01:00:00:00Scenes.Picture
- 01:00:12:08Atmospheres.Ambience
- 01:00:31:15Footsteps.Foley
- 01:00:47:02Rain.Ambience
- 01:01:03:20Doors.Foley
- 01:01:18:11Breathing.Voice
- 01:01:26:04Violence.SFX
- 01:01:40:00Silence.No cue
Characters entering rooms.
The sound before something terrible happens.
The music underneath a moment when nobody is speaking.
I wasn’t thinking like a nightclub DJ anymore.
I was thinking like a storyteller.
08 Audio drama
I didn’t want an audiobook.I wanted a world with its eyes closed.
When I started thinking about bringing my graphic novels into audio, I didn’t want one narrator sitting behind a microphone reading every character.
I wanted actors.
I wanted somebody wearing headphones to close their eyes and still be able to see the scene.
That’s when producing music became part of my Multi-Creative world again.
Only this time, I wasn’t trying to make somebody dance until sunrise.
I was trying to make somebody feel something they couldn’t see.
09 LOON HQ
From Cora Zoneto LOON.
Funny thing is, I never really left music.
It just kept changing jobs.
- It started with my father.
- Then a scratched-up Realistic mixer.
- Two used Pioneer turntables.
- My sister’s speakers.
- A block party.
- An answering machine.
- South Florida.
- House music.
- Nightclubs.
- Raves.
- Miami.
- Ibiza.
- Dubai.
- Rio.
- FL Studio.
- Then storytelling brought everything back around.
Today, music lives inside LOON HQ beside photography, cinematography, editing, writing, drawing, voice work and everything else I create.
That’s one of the reasons I built HQ in the first place.
I didn’t want
A room forMusic.
A room forPhotography.
A room forFilm.
A room forWriting.
A room forEverything else.
I wanted one place where all of it could collide.
So I built one.
HQ isn’t a music studio.
It’s a studio for everything.
And music was here long before the sign went on the door.
Listen Original compositions
Hear what
I’m building.
Made at LOON HQ. Nothing plays until you press play.
Awakening
0:00 / 4:25
Desperation
0:00 / 4:23
Search Within
0:00 / 4:07
Coming From the world of INKZOS
Sounds fromBLOODLINKED
Pieces of a film soundtrack, still being written at HQ.
Enter BLOODLINKED- 1M1The Vaelmorra ThemeIn the studio
- 1M2JulianIn the studio
- 1M3CassianIn the studio
- 1M4ClaraIn the studio
- 1M5The AwakeningIn the studio
- 1M6The World EngineIn the studio
- 1M7The God ProtocolIn the studio