At their core, Philly-based band Interminable is all about connection and celebration. Musically, their songs combine jazz, rock, and funk with son jarocho, a form of Mexican folk music regional to Veracruz. This eclectic approach allows the band to highlight the commonalities between cultures and people from around the world.
Interminable’s latest project, an EP called The Lifegivers, explores our relationship with life, death, and the magic of self-actualization. Dedicated to Black and Brown transwomen and the band’s late bassist, Yeho Bostick, The Lifegivers is a profound and uplifting meditation on what it means to be human. We spoke with Interminable founder, Ximena Violante, about the new project and how music has the power to bring us into our fullest selves.
Interminable | photo by Manny Vasquez
John Morrison: How did Interminable start?
Ximena Violante: Back in 2015, I was fresh outta school and looking to start a band. I led community music workshops around an Afro indigenous Mexican tradition called son jarocho. I was teaching those workshops, and I was like, all right, I know I wanna start a band. [Philly music bookers] AFROTAINO reached out and they were like, “Hey, we have this Cumbia group coming through. Would your son jarocho group wanna open?” And I was like, “it’s more like a workshop series. We’re barely learning our first song. You know, it’s students. It’s not really that vibe, but I’m a musician, I could open.” So they’re like, “great, it’s in a week and a half.”
So I’m there at the workshops again, our 10-minute break, like, “Hey, I need a name for my band.” I knew I wanted it to be something that was a word in both Spanish and English. And I wanted something that felt interesting, fun, complex, but accessible at the same time. So we were just brainstorming and [somebody said] “Interminable.” And I’m like, wait, that’s actually really cool. You can pronounce it in Spanish or English and it’s the same word. Never ending, kind of endless. And then as the years have gone by, I’m like, wait, this is actually like really profound. ‘Cause I do feel like it’s at the core of what we do. Once we inspire someone, when we create something, that can send off a spark of inspiration to someone else, which then inspires someone else. And then it becomes this endless ripple of slowly building like a better world for ourselves.
Interminable | photo by Alexandre Da Veiga
JM: Thinking about this idea of endlessness, when you said that, I thought of tradition, right? So the music that you’re playing comes from somewhere. Could you tell me about son jarocho, that tradition, its origins, and what led to you playing this kind of music?
XV: I’m originally from Mexico City, but then I moved up to the U.S. to a white Philly suburb when I was like seven. There was no one else [who] spoke Spanish. It was a completely different world. And so I grew up pretty disconnected from my culture…from my heritage. I always had an interest in music, and what was accessible to me then was classical music. I grew up playing classical violin. And then it was rock, so I grew up listening to like, I don’t know, My Chemical Romance, things like that. A lot of alternative rock, indie kind of stuff. And then I started playing electric guitar. But then I get to college and I started meeting other Mexican folks, other Chicano folks. I ended up leading the mariachi group out there, even though I was like, I have no idea what I’m doing. They were like, well, we’re graduating, so you’re in charge of it now.
JM: Yeah, yeah. Pass it along.
XV: And that’s really when I started singing. I was studying music, so it’s like, you have to sing, but I did not like to sing at all. But then I joined that band, and we’re all singing together. And I also started singing in Spanish, where I feel like the vowel shapes are different. Suddenly, I was like, oh, wait, I can do this, and I actually enjoy it. I also started realizing just how little I knew about my own culture and about how vast Latin American culture is. It connects to everything else. I realized how limited my knowledge was of music, even though I had been studying it for so long at that point.
It really led me down this rabbit hole of discovering so many different artists, so many different rhythms, seeing how they all started interconnecting. And then that eventually led me to son jarocho and how people were adapting it to modern times as well. I actually first connected with this tradition through a band that is doing a modernized Chicano version of it. They’re called Las Cafeteras, they’re from L.A. So, it was in listening to them and their first album which got me really excited. And so I started going to workshops, learning as much as I could about it. And I found a community that was so welcoming and so generous. The focus of the music wasn’t to make it perfect, it was to share in it. There’s a word that we use a lot in that tradition that’s called convivencia [“coexist” in English] and it’s like the act of like being together of sharing.
JM: That had to have been such a beautiful, profound experience. Growing up, as you said, feeling disconnected from the roots of where you come from, and then being able to reconnect and find a new way of expressing yourself through this thing has been here for a long time.
XV: Yeah. And I think it’s also this larger thing that, as migrants, as people of many diasporas, there has been a concerted effort to disconnect us. And there continues to be even stronger efforts to disconnect us from our cultures, from our beliefs, from our ways of being. And so it is a really profound thing. I see it for myself, and I hope that it can also inspire others to know that we can stand in our cultures. We can nourish ourselves in these other ways of understanding life. Almost like seeing that light of life within us, that it’s there and we’ve been told it’s been ripped from us. But we can actively seek it out and reconnect with it in our own ways.
Interminable The Lifegivers EP | cover art by Daniel De Jesus
JM: The Lifegivers is such a beautiful record. Could you walk me through the nuts and bolts of it?
XV: It’s three songs. The first song is called “El Huracán” or “the Hurricane,” and it’s a really special one. It’s a song that our buddy Yeho Bostic wrote before passing. He had a really long last couple of years, battling with cancer. He made a post while he was in the hospital. He was like, “I wish I could have written a song.” Something like that. And then when he got better, I was like, “Hey, let’s do it.”
I went over to his house, and he was all like, “but I don’t know how to write in Spanish,” and I’m like, “don’t worry, I’ll help you out. Just tell me what ideas you have, give me an idea, and I’ll help you out.” He’s like, “I was thinking of this riff, and these chords. I’m thinking about the hurricane and using it as a metaphor for life, and how a storm comes and it’s so tumultuous. But then later the blue skies come again.”
We had the honor of getting to play it live with him before he passed at this beautiful series of events we did at Alma Del Mar, which [was] a restaurant in South Philly that unfortunately had to close its doors. But it was really beautiful to get to do those shows with him. A couple of months later, he passed, and obviously, there’s so much grief that comes with that, including not having gotten to record the studio version with him. That hit me pretty hard. He was such a light, multi-talented, was in a bunch of different projects and just such a gem in the Philly music sphere. You gotta give grief some time, and then eventually it was like, it’s time, we gotta record it with other people and have that be a tribute to him.