La Vida Bohéme

Hi, we are La Vida Bohéme…

We are Henry D’Arthenay (lead guitar and vocals), Daniel de Sousa (guitar), Sebastián Ayala(drums) and Rafael Pérez Medina (bass). We formed the band in 2007 and have lived between Venezuela and Spain ever since.

We are about to release our first record, NUESTRA, in Mexico, USA and Canada. It was produced by local guru Rudy Pagliuca and mastered by Argentinean maestro Andrés Mayo. We like to think the record owes as much to LCD Soundsystem and The Clash as it does to Mercedes Sosa and Mano Negra.

It’s been a bumpy road, filled with shows at Venezuelan bars and dives and ambitious art projects that usually got us broke after getting them done. At some point in 2008, we entered a local contest of rock bands, and although we are not a rock band, we managed to win it. Not that it was really important, but it did open some doors that were previously closed for us back home. A trip to Argentina and mild radio airplay in Venezuela followed suit with some, errr, rather unfinished demos we had back then under our belts.

Eventually things got serious. Our line-up changed from 4 musicians to 4 musicians and 500 kids –La Résistance-, that moved with us from venue to venue. Bars were filled and people somehow learned the lyrics to songs that were not even close to being released. La Résistance got bigger. Show promoters started knocking our doors. Local radio stations called and demanded a single from a record that was yet to be produced. We felt screwed. We were developing a dead-serious, loyal following and somehow managed to fail them to get a record in their computers, ipods, cd players… As far as we were concerned, we were failing.

So we started playing as much as we could to save up some money and get a record done. Friends and families shipped in. La Résistance did, as well… So we got in the studio… THREE TIMES.

The search for a producer was a tiresome, quasi-eternal process. We even finished the first attempt at getting it done, only to bury the tracks and start looking for a producer all over again. And then, we met Rudy Pagliuca, who got us back in the studio and helped us get the record we had in our heads done.

We released it back home online and for free to get the word out and it worked. Over 20.000 direct downloads in less than 3 months brought us bigger and better radio stations, show promoters and bars that housed La Résistance and aided us in almost any goal we wanted to achieve. It’s not been easy but quite frankly, we’ve never been alone in this. From day one we’ve received help from every corner of our local scene.

And we guess that’s why we don’t like to call ourselves a band. We are not a band, really. We like to see ourselves as the representatives of a community of kids who want music and art in their lives, as opposed to most of the things that fill Latin America’s news channels and newspaper headlines.

There’s no easy way to close an auto biography, so let’s only say to whomever might be reading this and liked what read, heard, saw: get or download our record and pass it along… It’s just as yours as it is ours (NUESTRA).