The Mingarro brothers, Juan (1978) and Alejandro (1981) were born in Huesca, Spain. They spent our childhood in a small town called Binéfar, drawing comics, building vehicles for their action figures and shooting movies with their domestic camcorder. In 2006, they founded Brosmind and got stablished in Barcelona. They combine commercial illustration with personal projects involving multiple disciplines, such as sculpture, music or video. Brosmind’s style is fresh and optimistic, with a constant presence of fantasy and humour.

What role does music play in your day-to-day life as creatives?

Well, we spend a lot of time together at the studio, a 56 m2 room filled with pictures, sculptures, gadgets, tools, toys… a really busy and messy creative space. It’s just the two of us inside there, and we usually spend up to 10 hours working side by side. Along those long working sessions, many different peaks of concentration, relax and intensity occur, and we always try to find a nice soundtrack for each moment.

We could say that podcasts and Spotify music are our main choices, but we also listen to the radio very often. That plan works for the two of us most of the time, but of course we sometimes disagree. While Juan preffers to always have a sound playing in the background, Alejandro is a great defencer of silence at some moments, to create a peaceful and deep moment of concentration.

Focusing on music, it’s a very important companion for us, which for sure influences our mood, and inspires us somehow. It’s hard to idenfify, but probably a part of that daily soundtrack is finally reflected into our creations.

We listen to a wide range of music, from classical to rap, to jazz, to rock… it just depends on the day, the season or how we feel in each moment. Probably this variety is also because if you spend as many hours at the desk,  is easy to get bored and then we try to find something new and different all the time.

We’ve been always interested in music since we were kids. We are not professional musicians but we learnt to play some instruments and some of our recent projects are related with music. We usually create all the soundtrack and sound effects for our movies, and we recently built a midi based keyboard which we use to play songs live during our conferences.

Tell us about your playlist:

As you will see, our list is tremendously anarchic and diverse.

Maybe it doesn’t work like the perfect music session (maybe yes), but we feel that transmits really well our love for exploring the most diverse kinds of music and authors. In the list, you can also feel the influence of our life story as brothers, as some of the themes are songs we grew up with. Probably is weird to put a song from your childhood to the people of your studio, but not if your team mate is your own brother, who shares the exact memories about that track. Some of those  early memories songs (by Luciano Pavarotti, Franco Battiato, Michel Pettrucciani and Stephane Grappelli, or Grace Jones), are songs that our parents put at home while we were kids, while we were playing with our toys at the living room.

Then, we have some songs which belong to our teenager, or young adult stages. During those years, each of us had different tastes and tried to build their own music collection. Anyway, the fact that we still lived together during most of this years (first at our family home, after that in the student’s residence in Barcelona), made that both of us met our brother’s favorite musicians. Some examples from those years are artists like Eels, Beck, Kase-O, Jack White…

The remaining songs of this quick classification are the ones that we discovered after we finished our studies and created Brosmind. That’s when we started to spend a lot of time working together at the studio which allowed to discover a lot of different bands together. We heard to some of those songs millions of time, and that selection is a nice spectrum of local and foreigner artists and bands that we’ve been living with during the last 10 years at the studio.

When we look at that song list, many related stories come to our minds, and some of them cross each other and travel trough time. For example, we know pianist Glenn Gould since our childhood, as our father is a big fan. He even had some Laser Discs of him, where he appeared playing and talking in english. The truth is that at that time we didn’t understood anything, but he was such a charismatic and funny guy that we love to see on screen. So, Glenn Gould was going to be on that list for sure… and then, we just experienced a reunion with this artist as last week. While we were looking for the perfect gift for our father’s birthday we found in Amazon a really nice book which compiled many mails and letters written by the artist to other musicians, his fans, etc… Of course we bought it for him, and after that, we’ve been doing a really intense review of Glenn recordings at the studio during the last days.

So, even if the list looks a bit chaotic, we hope you’ll enjoy the list. We think is a nice rapprochement to our life’s music experiences.

@brosmind
http://www.brosmind.com