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On 27th June 2014 the debut album by Cuban singer songwriter Erdwin Garcia will be released in Ireland and online. I recorded the album with Erdwin in Cuba in 2011 and spent the last three years preparing the album for release.
This Fund it project has been set up to bring Erdwin to Ireland to perform to an Irish audience for the first time. It will be the first opportunity for an Irish audience to see and hear Erdwin perform his debut album 'Removiendo' live.
Erdwin is a 26 old singer songwriter who lives in Trinidad de Cuba where he makes a living playing gigs and teaching. I first met Erdwin in 2009 at the opening of an exhibition in Trinidad de Cuba where he was performing with his band. We spent the next few days recording a demo using a handheld recorder, I flew back to Ireland, edited and mixed the demo and sent the CD’s back to Erdwin.
That seemed to be the end of it but I got such a good reaction to the demo that I decided to travel to Cuba to record album with Erdwin. In July 2011 I arrived back in Jose Martí Airport in Havana with a mobile recording studio hidden in my suitcase. I got to Trinidad de Cuba and we started looking for a place to record. Recording studios are rare in Cuba so we walked the streets in a tropical heatwave looking for permission to use various nightclubs (during the day), bars, arts centres, even a cave (anywhere with decent acoustics, silence and preferably air conditioning!). We had no luck so eventually had to record in a bedroom, stuffing blankets into the shutters to reduce the noise of the birds outside. This meant we were basically recording in a sauna, the laoptop could handle about 12 minutes of recording before overheating, then we would shut everything down and pull the blankets off the shutters to let some air in.
This Fund it project has been set up to bring Erdwin and his band to Europe and perform outside of Cuba for the first time. We will film this journey as he leave Cuba - he has never been on a plane, never stayed in a hotel or been in a guitar shop. He has never seen advertising as it exists in Western countries - there's no commercial advertising in Cuba. In Ireland Erdwin and his band will experience a world completely different to Cuba and he will bring something unique to an Irish audience - his music.
The gig will take place in Dublin in September 2014. The more money we raise the larger the venue and the more of his band we can bring for what will be a unique and amazing live music experience. The audience will see a new generation of Cuban musicians make their mark outside of Cuba for the first time.
Any assistance you can offer would be very very much appreciated.
