Oscar Sueiro is a freelance filmmaker, lecturer, film critic and essayist for the Dilatando Mentes publishing company. Beyond that, he works on personal projects oriented towards his passion for fiction short films and documentary cinema. MaQKina: History of a subculture is his latest work, which is a musical emotional and sociological claim through the genre of machine music, from its roots in the first movements that emerged in Valencia, until it reached Catalonia in the 90s. The documentary explores how a musical genre became an authentic mass movement, a huge business, and an urban and working-class youth subculture, to the point of becoming a real threatening in the eyes of the authorities. All that stigma generated around that culture began to raise questions about musical quality and how harmful those environments could be.

Where is the figure of the musician in a genre like this?

Many say, as we say in the documentary, that there was no musician figure as such, but remember that the machine music DJs had to play vinyl records, sometimes even with three vinyl records at a time.

Why do you think that this social stigma was generated around this genre?

It is normal for this stigma to arise, and in fact, it is true that there were people in this area who were creating problems. They caused the stigma and, unfortunately, that was the image that stayed with the external audience. All the same, this was not the reality of those of us who were just wanting to have fun. On top of all that, the media made a sensationalist, exaggerated and magnified mockery, like what had happened previously in Valencia. This is how the stigma was built, the result of the massification of the audience. That is why, along with the bad environments around this music, that those of us who liked the genre and were going just to dance and have fun stopped going and began to look for other environments.

How important was that music for its audience?

To answer that, we need to put this into context. There was a serious unemployment crisis and people who had problems went to the parties to forget about everything and jump and dance to the sound of the music. That has incredible value, leaving everything behind and focusing on the happiness generated by serotonin. This feeling is what we wanted to express in the documentary.

How did the idea of creating MaQKina come about?

We started this project three years ago, even though I had had the idea in mind for a long time. We have added the subtitle so that you can understand a little better that it is a social-musical documentary. Not only did we focus on machine music itself, but on everything it meant for this city and the generation that experienced it, we wanted to show how the musical genre became a mass trend.

And why the K?

We wanted to make this play on words, or better said, letters, for a reason of history. When machine (máquina) music began and was called just that, it was written with “q.” At that time it was a mixture of dance music, new beat… But it wasn’t until native Catalan production began that the “k” of “Catalanity” was added. It started to be used as a marketing tool. As it was a new sound, particular in Catalan music, it was granted that distinction. We wanted to play with that evolution within the title of the documentary.

What was the creating process of the documentary like?

Documentary production always involves a certain complexity and a lot of work, effort, dedication and, above all, time. In a project of this magnitude, this has been one of our biggest challenges, dealing with the 25 hours of interviews we did for the documentary. In the end we reduced 40 years of history into an 85-minute film. Making this synthesis with order and meaning so that the audience understands everything we wanted to explain on the musical, social, political level was the real challenge for us.

How do you deal with and develop such a high load of content?

One person alone cannot undertake a project like this one. Fortunately, I joined forces with Alex Salgado, who already had experience in documentary film making with Citizen FG: Dance or die. Daniel Bosch also joined as an ally. Together, we are the three pillars that have supported the project. My conclusion is that the challenge, no matter how great it may be, involves learning through teamwork. It was a pleasure to meet all those artists I had admired since I was young. It was a lot of fun to talk to them and have them tell us the story first hand.

What does it mean to present the documentary at the In-Edit Festival?

I am a devoted cinemagoer and therefore a long-time fan of In-Edit. There are documentaries on all musical genres: punk, hip-hop… Years ago I thought about the documentary and had thought about the possibility of presenting it here as well. In-Edit is the most important musical documentary film festival in the world. Even though this film genre is for a devoted cinemagoer audience, it is becoming very popular, and people have been coming in droves for years. It is a real luxury to have a festival of this calibre in Barcelona. As the author of a musical documentary, the highest goal, the best place in the world to premiere the documentary was the In-Edit Festival.

What message do you want to convey to the audience?

With the documentary we intend to express something that goes beyond the mere musical aspect and covers topics more related to society, cultural movement and even politics. We want to launch the message: get rid of the prejudices that are entangling us right now. As with urban genres such as trap or reggaeton, we put aside the stigmas and connotations that surround them to appreciate the musical experience. In the end, machine music ended up becoming something familiar, of relatives of our friends and of friends who were family.