Santiago Latorre and Nieves Arilla At the foot of the bed at the Hotel Sauce

The concert is for two; just like the bed. You can come with your friend, a family member, your child, your partner… or you can buy just one ticket and make the experience more exciting by meeting your concert partner directly on the mattress. After reserving your ticket, you will show up at the Hotel Sauce at the agreed time and we, the receptionists, will give you the relevant instructions and the room key. Santiago Latorre and Nieves Arilla await you there to dedicate the most intimate and intense of concerts to you; a concert at the Foot of Bed.

The pilot experience took place in the Casa de los Balconucos, Cantabria, in which “the project took shape,” explains Santiago. They have also held concerts in private homes in Barcelona; However, this is the first time that the A Pie de Cama concerts have become a public event. “The Hotel Sauce combines a particularly familiar and personal treatment with all guests, including the artists we usually host there, with a cozy environment in which the decoration of each room is different and lovingly made,” says Eduardo Pérez, from Born! Music, producer of the event. “These factors make it a perfect setting to carry out such an atypical project, which other chain hotels would not understand as well.”

Within the framework of the Bombo y Platillo Concert Club, Santiago Latorre and Nieves Arilla invite you to the Hotel Sauce to live a unique sound and sensory experience. Santiago explains it to you in this interview. You sign up? The dates are April 11 and 12, and next week we will tell you how it was experienced and what those who decided to lie in bed and let themselves go felt. Do you want to be part of history? Well hurry, tickets are selling out! Open the door to the Pie de Cama concert at the Hotel Sauce!

Lie in bed and have them sing in your ear. Together with an acquaintance… or a stranger. At the Sauce Hotel. You dare?

An intimate concert could be held in a hall, a bedroom, or any small, personal space. Why specifically the bed?

The bed is linked to a lot of life experiences: from birth to death, through love, sex, illness, dreams… It has many connotations that we associate with things we have experienced. The bed provides content and power that are personal and different for each one of us, depending on our experiences.

What is a concert like that is given to the ear while the audience – a maximum of two people – is lying on a bed?

Concerts usually have that eye contact component where you look and are looked at, and we wanted to eliminate that. The A Pie de Cama sessions are intimate “concerts”, with two voices, in which we try to get the listener to let their guard down and let themselves go. This is achieved more easily if the person singing does not influence you with their way of moving, with their gestures, and if there are no exchanges of glances. It is something purely sound and sensory, for them and for us.

How did the idea of giving this type of concert come about?

It arose after one of my more “normal” concerts, in which I worked with the idea of amplifying the sounds that occur near me, in the privacy of my room: the voice of a non-singer, the soft sound of the sax like if I played for myself, etc. One night, after one of them, a friend told me: “Why don’t you come to my house and continue singing in my ear?” And then I thought, “This is very powerful!” From there, with Nieves, we began to look for the right songs, make the arrangements, find a way to fill our voices by singing very softly…

Until now you have mostly done concerts in private homes. What do you think doing it at the Hotel Sauce brings?

Doing it in a hotel and buying tickets online makes it easier to break the barrier of shyness that many people have when it comes to arranging a personal session. A hotel is a comfortable environment for everyone, an intermediate space that is neither ours nor theirs. At the same time, Hotel Sauce has a family character and strives to make visitors feel somewhat at home, which makes it ideal for this proposal.

What are the public’s reactions to A Pie de Cama concerts?

When people learn about our project, at first they are curious, but they also object to the perception that we are invading their privacy, their home, and it is a bit difficult for them to decide. They usually start the concert a little cautious, but then they tell us that after one song they were already relaxed. Each person responds in a different way: there are people who tell you that it has brought back memories of their childhood, when their mother sang to them; There are people who enjoy themselves pleasantly and have a smile on their face all the time; There are people who cry or go through different strong emotions, and there are also people who, although they do not fall asleep, remain in a deep state of relaxation.

What is this experience giving you, as authors?

It’s quite shocking, because being so close to people, you experience the sensations they go through while you’re singing. Sometimes it’s even difficult to continue singing when the person you’re close to is laughing, or crying, or it’s someone you know, or two you don’t know but whose relationship you’re imagining throughout the session… It’s quite a rush of sensations. strong. It’s very engaging. After the first concert we always say: “come on, next one!” Although also after a few you are knackered, not only in terms of your voice, but also emotionally.

Who are the people who sign up for these types of concerts?

People who sign up for A Pie de Cama concerts do so regardless of the musical genres they like, because the experience goes beyond musical aesthetics: it has more to do with vibrations, with intimacy, with memory. … Some songs are ours, others are old, the kind that bring back memories. We have had from 15 year old teenagers to 70 year old people. Anyone can take advantage of the experience.

Interview at the foot of the bed with Nieves, Bea and Carlos

The two-person audience for each A Pie de Cama session took the elevator down to the reception, and we, the receptionists, were the first people they saw after the experience. Of the 48 people who experienced it, some arrived floating, relaxed. Others, with teary eyes. Others, with a bright smile installed on their face or even in the middle of a weak and happy laugh… “How did it go?” we asked them. “It’s something incredible, it forces you to savor every second, it’s something that happened here and now and only for us,” said one. “It’s like a massage of the soul,” said another. “Super relaxing, but here my husband started snoring!” said a girl. “I don’t feel like I’ve fallen asleep at any point, but I must have relaxed so much that I didn’t even realize it!” he defended himself.
Although everyone agreed that it was a unique and unforgettable experience, everyone found it difficult to define it. Two singers. Two people per audience. The public does not see the singers and the singers sing with their eyes closed, in such a way that if they met on the street they would not even be able to recognize each other.

And, although the experience is included in Born Music’s Bombo y Platillo concert series, Nieves and Santiago prefer to discard the word concert and define it rather as “a collection of songs to sing in the ear anywhere there is a bed”.

What does it feel like when Nieves and Santiago whisper their songs to you? What do they feel when they see the reactions of the people they sing to? We had the opportunity and luxury of being able to sit for a while in My Favorite Room with Nieves Arilla and one of the couples she and Santiago sang for: Bea and Carlos.

“When the session was over, we realized that our faces had changed”

A well-thought-out repertoire for an experience that is difficult to define… After 24 sessions of A Pie de Cama at the Sauce Hotel this weekend, can we explain it better?

NIEVES: The songs are chosen to promote an emotional journey. Songs of love, of heartbreak, fun, old, modern… The first and last songs are always the same: the first is a song by Santiago with lyrics from his mother, and the last is a poem by Pessoa with music by Santiago. The others depend on the moment. Defining Bedside is difficult because it is something that each person experiences in their own way. My father, for example, every time the topic comes up, he doesn’t understand anything! He seems very strange to her. It is something very intimate and sensory: we sing in your ear and you hear our breathing, you feel our emotion… It is not like a normal concert.

Bea and Carlos: is this how you have experienced it?

CARLOS: Yes. It is like a journey that takes you through your emotions and your own memories or experiences. They play a lot with spaces, distances, volumes, textures, nuances…

BEA: It’s like a story is whispered to you from the beginning to the end and you travel through different emotions. Sadness, joy, sorrow, melancholy… When the session is over, we looked at each other and realized that both of our faces had changed. We were totally relaxed. Now I would hug Carlos and get into bed. It is an ideal gift for Valentine’s Day!

Nieves, you are from Saragossa. What does it mean to you to have launched this project “at home”?

The idea of the Bedside sessions in a public place was born to be carried out at the Hotel Sauce in Saragossa, not anywhere in Saragossa. Without Hotel Sauce, perhaps we would not have come to Zaragoza. And both Santiago, who studied in this city, and I were tremendously excited. Being at home you feel like you already have a part done. Furthermore, this will help us make ourselves known, because it is such a special project and the idea is so complicated to explain that you have to live it to be able to understand it. And the more people experience it, the more people they can tell.

Why did you choose the Hotel Sauce for A Pie de Cama? What have you contributed to the project?

NIEVES: It’s great for doing A Pie de Cama. The two rooms we used were beautiful and also the atmosphere in the hotel is very special, very suitable for this. You have helped us a lot and everything has been very easy.

CARLOS: I didn’t know the hotel and I thought it was super cool. I am a sound and lighting technician and I visit dozens of hotels, and this one seemed super delicate to me, with very careful details: the decoration, the chairs, the tables, the pictures on the walls… A Pie de Cama fits it perfectly, and I think it’s a shame that you are open to this type of initiative. It has been a discovery.

Bea and Carlos, were you nervous before starting the concert? How have you been reacting? And how have you seen, Nieves, that evolution in the public?

BEA: Even though Nieves is a friend of mine, you get a little nervous when you see how intimate everything is. At first we were waiting for them to come in and we were nervous and intrigued, but then we relaxed and it even didn’t feel right to me.

NIEVES: At first everyone is nervous. Some put a blanket over themselves as if to protect themselves from whatever comes. There was a very funny couple yesterday who were so nervous that they were dying of laughter. When they heard us enter they were still half laughing, but once we started singing they stayed quiet and didn’t move the entire time. I have opened my eyes more to look and record the moment. Santiago had his eyes more closed.

One of the girls who came to a session with her husband claimed that he had snored…

NIEVES: There was a boy who at the end of the session started breathing very hard. We thought that he might have fallen asleep, but it is a very pleasant moment and everyone has the right to experience it however they want.
Perhaps that is what makes many people rush to sign up; the fear of how they will react. What would you say to those people?

NIEVES: Any reaction is good. If the body asks you for something, it will surely be fine, and that is exactly what you are looking for. In A Pie de Cama there are no rules.

CARLOS: The singers provide all the facilities: you regulate the light, you decide how far from the edge of the bed you lie; If you want, you cover yourself, and the singers also close their eyes. I would tell them to let themselves go, that no one knows what this experience can awaken in you, and if you feel butterflies in your stomach, take the opportunity to live it.