Gustavo Cerati

In the winter of 2001, Gustavo Cerati stood in front of a 35-millimeter camera in Buenos Aires to shoot +Bien. He wasn't looking for a flattering cameo or to sing on screen. Director Eduardo Capilla gave him the role of Jorge, a disillusioned doctor, in a low-budget independent production.

Nobody expected him to take the role.

But Cerati had studied advertising and understood visual storytelling as an inseparable part of sound. He also composed the full soundtrack, a work of electronic textures and acoustic guitars released in 2001 that ended up competing at the Latin Grammy Awards. The film flopped at the Argentine box office, but it worked as the laboratory where the musician began to conceive his songs directly in the format of a cinematic shot.

The obsession with sound editing

Before he started recording, Cerati thought like an editor. In 1982, he founded Soda Stereo with Zeta Bosio and Charly Alberti after meeting in the Advertising program at the Universidad del Salvador. Studying visual communication shaped the trio's stage presence, from their first music video to the band's breakup in 1997.

When his definitive solo career began with Bocanada in 1999, he locked himself in the Abbey Road Studios in London with a forty-piece orchestra and boxes full of vinyl records to sample loose bars. He mixed wooden guitars with trip-hop digital drums.

And the gamble paid off perfectly.

Because he didn't want to repeat tested formulas. For Siempre es hoy, released in 2002, he accumulated hundreds of hours of improvisations on hard drives before writing a single vocal melody. He cut fragments of digital audio the way one edits film. In 2006 he changed his working method with Ahí vamos, an album dominated by amplifiers pushed to the limit, which shipped more than 200,000 copies during its first weeks in stores.

The Final Cut in Caracas

In 2009, he released Fuerza Natural, conceived as a concept album with a road movie structure. He recorded the acoustic tracks in New York and designed a series of coordinated music videos to tell a continuous story through each song.

On May 15, 2010, he gave the last concert of that tour on the soccer field of Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas before ten thousand people. As he came off the stage toward the dressing room, he suffered an ischemia that led to a severe stroke.

As a result, the audiovisual project for that album was left unfinished in the editing room. He spent four years in a coma at a clinic in Buenos Aires until a respiratory arrest stopped his brain activity on September 4, 2014, at age 55.