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From album
Con el corazón en la mano
Aterciopelados · 1994 · Track 3
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The story behind
In Símbolo marciano the air becomes charged with urgency from the very first seconds. It's not a song that asks for permission: it bursts in with a pulse reminiscent of the most raw punk of the 80s, but with an unexpected twist. The guitar riff doesn't stay still in a traditional measure; it moves between tensions and distensions as if searching for something it never quite finds. There's something in that obsessive repetition that sounds like an unanswered question, like that moment when the band didn't yet know they were inventing a new sound for Aterciopelados, but they were already doing it.
They recorded it in two months at Studio Master Producciones in Bogotá, during the spring of 1993. The full album, Con el corazón en la mano, was released that same year on vinyl, cassette, and CD, and although it now sounds like a cult object, at the time it sold around 50,000 copies — a number that, for a Colombian artist at the time, was a statement. The production was handled by Juan Antonio Castillo, and the mixing was done by Richard Blair, two names who at the time worked with borrowed equipment and no pretensions of grandeur. What came out of there wasn't just an album: it was the first step of a band that, without meaning to, became a beacon for rock across all of Latin America.