Brainiac Beats or The Brain is the 36-year-old artist from Almería who has been recognized as “MUSIC CONTEST WINNER” for the Startup Europe Awards 2016. Consequently, his song will be part of the musical representation of the ceremony of 7th June.
He tells us about the origin of his pen name: “In the summer of 1997, when I started in the music world with my group “Rhajha”, they christened me with a new name, The Brain, because I was always creating new plans and having new ideas. A few years later, my friend from Canada, Nick, gave me the idea of being nicknamed Brainiac for international works.
He claims that passion for music started at the age of 4 or 5, when he listened to different styles of music with his father, from folklore coming from everywhere to classical music: “I got interested naturally in the hip hop culture and in its different facets, like the graffiti. At first, I only recorded fragments of music in a cassette that it could use afterwards to modify or remix and so doing my first creations.”
The Brain tells that he spent some years learning to play the piano and studying solfeggio. It was not until he was 17 when he started collecting CD’s, learning to DJ and to scratch.
He also mixes and masters audio professionally in his own study: “I work with all kinds of clients, but especially in the area of black music (hip hop, R&B and urban music). When I was living in Madrid I released my own record label to be able to edit my own music in vinyl. There, I developed tasks of administration, accountancy, management, promotion, etc… Currently, I also work as adviser other artists and producers, both in artistic development and in digital marketing”.
As every artist, he needs inspiration and says, “I try that the inspiration can always find me working in something, as Picasso said. I open the musical creation programme and I start to lead some instruments so I play with them until a sound makes me imagine something more than might accompany it. For the music of SEUA16, I imagined something epic and organic and at the same time elegant, but especially modern and contemporary for the entrepreneurial young people; that is why I have used piano and strings to get a more formal tone, and a drum-set as more striking and current instrument.”
He considers important the fact of being selected as “soundtrack” of a project that rewards companies of young people that have a business vision and put it bravely into practice. “During all my work trajectory I have collaborated with many projects in almost 20 years in the musical industry. It is a great step for my career that my music has been selected by the first time for a European project. I believe in the ideal of which union is strength, the sense of community and what is chased by the European Union, for what this prize is a pleasure and a real honour.
Finally, he confesses: “The crisis brought me to Belgium, as everybody. But actually I needed to undertake a new adventure with my wife, to go out of “safe zone” to learn and to explain myself by new challenges. If I could go back in the time, I would turn it to doing one and thousand times because the personal and professional growth that has provided Belgium to me since I came, has been enormous. “