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Gather 'round the exorcism, dance with your phantoms.
Mesogothic ritual and warehouse BPMs meet candle-lit cloud rap in Beli's realm of glory and remorse. The California duo seem to take pain by the hand before purging it; their towering synthsurges and power chords offer a zone for healing through mayhem.
If there's a Beli lyric that sums up the grandeur of their transmissions so far, it might be "Drinking stardust under the moon," a one-liner nestled in the glow of their 2022 effort, Seven Channel Aura. Much of CRYCORE, their latest project, hits with the serene exhilaration of an imminent meteor shower.
Bandmates Moises Valencia, from LA, and Jesse Villegas, from Santa Cruz, half-jokingly wear sadness on their sleeve (and their album art), placing humor right beside loss. Two tonally opposing couplets — “10 of you are smiling in our memory / like sunsets that killed our fathers,” “100 cc’s / chain’s hot" — live within striking distance of each other on the song "99tears." Six-winged seraphs, seven-day wick and wax, halos, and crosses (sometimes made of speakers) accompany the music.
An old internet photo of the Beli crew has them standing in front of an engraving of a Nancy Byrd Turner quote: “Death is only an old door, set in a garden wall, on gentle hinges it gives, at dusk, when the thrushes call, along the lintel are green leaves.” The duo’s embrace of divinity (and vocal chains sheathed in guitar amps) (and fast-galloping tempos) result in music unique to them. On CRYCORE, death is a door and a friend; Moises and Jesse have the time of their lives in its presence, mourning and moving forward all at once. We hope you experience the same.
Keep reading for a deep-dive interview with Jesse and Moises, who were generous with their energies and their stories. Thank you for reading, watching, listening, and supporting.
Siber: Would the ideal operating mode for you both be nocturnal?
Moises: We’re not usually seen in daylight…
Jesse: That’s how we used to do it.
Moises: What changed is I started working a side gig at a restaurant. I used to work freelance a bunch so I’d be free every night, Jesse would be free three or four nights a week. Now he works days, I work nights.
Jesse: I used to be on demon time, yeah…
Moises: We used to live together back in Lincoln Heights in LA, by the Avenue 26 taco stand, La Naranja. Sharing that space is what allowed our project before CRYCORE, Seven Channel Aura, to become so dense. I’d knock on Jesse’s door and we’d open up a track, even if only for 20, 30 minutes. Our landlord was our age and lived in the back so we could play music until 5am, 6am, and he wouldn’t hear anything as long as we turned the bass down a bit. We were in that neighborhood when they opened a huge night market with 100s of people in and out every day.
Jesse: TikTok famous. We’d definitely be going to bed at 4am and waking up a few hours later to go to work. We had cars and girlfriends back then. [Laughs] When was that, 2019?
Moises: 2019 until like 2023. Our favorite taco spot still has tacos for $1.25.
Jesse: Rent-controlled tacos! Or chicken tacos from the spot by the corner. Because the freeway was there, there wasn’t too much art and such. Lots of working on music, stepping outside to get some Topo Chico, maybe White Claws from CVS, grabbing some tacos then getting back into it.
Moises: It was like a punk house. People always coming through, making music, partying, kicking it. We called the spot Beli HQ.
Jesse: That was the wifi name, too.
Moises: Beli only just started really collaborating with other people on music after years of us working together, but anyone who came over would jam. We have 30 hours of recordings from back then of people just fucking around. It was a good release.
Siber: Speaking of messing around and healthy forms of release, can you tell me a bit more about the weapons you’ve made for Beli so far? Was that nail bat homemade?
Moises: [Laughs] Our old bandmate made that one. We had a photo shoot with our homegirl who was focused on Mesoamerican-inspired fantasy stuff, taking it back to those obsidian blades, so we decided we’d each create something. Then we kept using them as props. There was a chain with daggers at the end of it. We wouldn’t bring them to a venue like Zebulon, but we’d have them for more DIY sets to go with our candles.
Jesse: I made an AK-47 once. It took awhile, but YouTube tutorials these days are really something… Kidding. My weapon was a bit like an anime character’s—
Moises: —the stars? Was it the stars?
Jesse: Yeah, I had the throwing stars.
Siber: You almost had me with the AK. The ghost gun movement is growing… that’s what Luigi used. Was this callback to that Mesoamerican history sparked by your photographer friend’s interest or a more longstanding pillar for you both?
Moises: So we’re both Latino, of mixed heritage. Jesse can obviously explain his own background but I’m half-Salvadorian and half-Colombian, mixed on both sides with tribes from El Salvador and European in there too, of course. We had talked with our friend about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Book of Enoch, which are essentially Christian fan fiction. It’s where the concept of angels and demons comes from, these texts not included in the Bible. This idea of a brown fantasy, a native fantasy really appealed to us. We’re all coming from places that are really religious, with superstitious backgrounds, so it felt like an interesting thing to play off of. Visually, it’s so striking. There’s so much density in the aesthetics. One of the tracks on Seven Channel Aura is called “Hada,” which means “fairy” in Spanish, and it samples a town in Guadalajara that supposedly found this mythical being that they wanted to believe in.
Siber: I really appreciate you sharing this context.
Moises: Yeah, we didn’t start the band because we wanted to make a witch house group. We just knew we liked working with each other. We had such different tastes, too, but Jesse and I really converged around gothic aesthetics from our own points of view.
Siber: Well beyond, or distinct from, this image a lot of us might have of Italian architecture or European folk tales.
Moises: Our culture is imbued with death imagery. It’s different from the cathedrals, which I love, too. Don’t get me wrong. What I’m wearing now, Cruz de Caravaca, is from Spain. There are so many spiritual objects you can get from, like, the botanica. People are making so much of this stuff and they’re often not even looking to sell it. It’s just like, “God wanted me to make this.” That’s fucking sick.
Jesse: When I was in Santa Cruz, I was gifted this thing based off of two Aztec gods, Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoca, right around the time that Moises and I met. I had this moment of appreciation of my roots, the Aztec pantheon of Gods, and went on my own hippy journey. I took my share of psychedelics at the time. Musically, it led to these ideas of concepts for my EPs where each one corresponds to a different deity. I remember writing a whole doc about it, having everything color-coded. We’re still living our ancestors’ journeys.
Moises: The last thing I’ll say about this is the importance of devotional art. Even Nosferatu, the thing about Robert Eggers saying how he missed just making stuff, wanting to make the most beautiful things and being jealous of old art, medieval religious art. Obviously there’s major problems with that too, but I like giving myself to something outside of my own ego, and spiritual art is diametrically opposed to this sell-yourself-on-Spotify era.
Jesse: I feel like we’ve never had so many people seeking the truth and so many people sharing the craziest ideas. Those two worlds are clashing all the time. It’s dangerous territory if you’re not doing your due diligence because people are easily controlled.
Moises: People love to get fucked into 'nuance.' You just got to have a backbone because nothing happens for the better without believing in something else. When people are like, “Ohhh, abolition? But wHo’s gOnNa rEpLaCe tHe PoLiCe” as a means of shutting you down, they’re preventing any space for the possibility of something better.
Siber: Instead of recognizing a problem, like police brutality and inefficacy, then asking a question to try and solve it, the question is instead used to vilify the recognition of the problem, to silence it. Whether it has to do with streaming or state violence.
Moises: Nuance is used as a euthanizing force. It only serves the status quo. It's never allowed to serve people on the receiving end of oppression, be it Palestinian resistance or Luigi Mangione or Fidel Castro. They are are framed as pure evil, with zero nuance or context.
Siber: A dozen people burned by molotov cocktails is paraded around as barbaric terrorism, but 10s of 1000s of people incinerated in Gaza is framed as perfectly acceptable, free of malice or bigotry. That's not to 'condone' an act of violence but to simply observe this disproportionate outrage. It reveals the same dehumanizing math.
Moises: People en masse understand society has to work the other way around, not top down but bottom up, because the wrong people are benefitting from the pain of the majority. A lot of us in this country are going to want better working conditions, healthcare, higher wages, but the how gets murky. Like, capitalism does not work. I believe in communism for the global south because we simply have to change course.
Siber: Did you have elders, mentors, that helped strengthen your links to your origins? And did you feel a tension between honoring these links within a broader, more whitewashed music culture in the States?
Jesse: That was part of the identity crisis I had being in Santa Cruz in this very white-washed town as this Brown kid trying to find this truth. I remember when I met Moises, it kinda brought me back. I saw this dude with a wifebeater and a Raiders hat, and I’m like, “What the fuck am I doing?“ [Laughs]
Moises: Jesse was like, “Let me take these Birkenstocks off.” [Laughs]
Jesse: Humble beginnings for sure. But it’s part of me, you know? It’s all who I am, including this curiosity. Maybe those homies from the Aztec times were aliens too. So now it’s like, how can we use this music technology to sprinkle that into the mix while also being on some IDM shit.
Moises: I was blessed to go to a pretty musical church as a kid, listening to lots of Peruvian music. El Taller del Alfarero, “The Workshop,” in Gardena. To this day, my pastor Esteban is one of the most talented musicians I know. He plays every instrument you can think of and I’d see him do that as a kid. He’s also my mom’s best friend; they have a super inspiring friendship. He told me he was blessed because God gave him an answer: as long as he played an instrument every day, he’d be okay, at home tinkering. I sold him a DD-20 giga delay pedal once because I needed the money. It was his medicine. He makes me believe there’s real magic in all kinds of music, and that we’re not limited to what others tell us people of our background should be making. We’re singing in Spanish on our new stuff and it’s also uniquely us.
Siber: The church is an all-time incubator for musical craft. I’ll never forget reading about the role it played in D’Angelo’s creative upbringing. Okay, so this is all down in LA. Can we bring it back up to Santa Cruz for a moment — what was going on when you both met?
Jesse: Moises must have only been there a few days. I took him to the studio we have at UCSC and made our first EP in the electronic music department room. After that, we went out to downtown Santa Cruz; I looked at Moi and I just knew! [Laughs] Nah I’m kidding, but yeah.
Moises: [Laughs] When we met and Jesse was showing me around, I remember we went to this plaza and there was a white couple playing the acoustic version of “Remix to Ignition.” At that moment, I was like, “Can we go?” [Laughs] So we left and ended up making a whole EP in 48, maybe 72 hours. We knew nothing about each other at that point. Not even three facts. And since then we’ve become family. We just trusted that we got each other right away, but it wasn’t until our second EP that we felt we found our sound.
Jesse: I was kind of hustling at the time. I needed something to give me the go-ahead to leave Santa Cruz. I was living in one of these dome houses, a very artsy place that kind of became this buffer. Moi sort of woke me out of a dream state, along with our old bandmate Hessed, that what I was doing at that time wasn’t serving me the way I wanted it to. It felt like retiring too young. [Laughs] That's what led me to move to LA.
Siber: Where does Hessed fit into the Beli origin story?
Moises: We met at a party and realized we were both into alternative music, both half Central American. We sent each other our music, fucked with it, met up, made a track, made another. Hessed was also visiting LA on the weekends from Santa Cruz. Not too long after that, he told me I should visit him and his friend Jesse.
Siber: Hessed was the connector.
Moises: Hessed was the connector.
Siber: What did you guys have to work with in the school studio?
Jesse: At the time they had this crazy spaceship synthesizer, lots of patches. The program started in the 80s; it gets funding every now and then and it just started receiving a little bit more money. It’s a little sanctuary, with a mixing room and everything. Whenever I had to work on my finals, if I couldn’t find a room in the library, I’d go there. But then I’d want to make music. [Laughs] When Moises visited it was definitely like showing him my healing space too. Lots of magic goes on in those environments. We just hit the ball running. We still have old tracks we never put out from those nights.
Siber: Our high school in Massachusetts had a little studio space too, a part of the “music tech” curriculum. It had a soundproof box with some starter kit equipment but it meant the whole world to a few of us. Many bathroom breaks spent in there for as long as we could stay without getting detention. People studied for finals, found their sound, had first kisses...
Moises: I think the thing I miss the most about college is just getting to exist in different buildings. Having multiple spots. Now I gotta pay them to just let me in the fucking place. [Laughs] That’s why I go to museums.
Siber: Doesn’t matter what’s on the walls.
Moises: As long as there are different buildings to enter!
Siber: Fast forwarding back to CRYCORE, to your most recent song “1v1,” what’s your collaboration style evolved to become? As a listener, I often perceive Beli songs as unified expressions. I know there’s two of you, but it feels like it’s one superhuman.
Moises: It’s honestly a pretty even exchange. Jesse has more engineering experience. He can mix and master music really well. At this point we’re both singing on every track, splitting songwriting duties, starting ideas — me with a synth, Jesse with a 12-string guitar or something. It’s a process of layering.
Jesse: We've definitely learned to meet halfway. Before, I’d set up most of the tracks. Moises has learned more on the engineering side too. This might be my ADHD, but it used to feel harder for me to stay focused on a song. I know how to keep the ball rolling a bit more now. We just know what we like. We used to question whether something was good a lot more before. Now we can be more decisive.
Moises: It’s never, like, “I don’t like this” with us. We can tweak what we’re doing, what the other is doing, if we need to by changing some parameter. Within a couple minutes we’re back on track. We both naturally agree on what the most beautiful version of what we make can sound like. I don’t think I’ve ever had to compromise on something with Jesse. We both get happy about the same things. The new song “1v1” is about a breakup I had, but Jesse was kind enough to write from my perspective for that one. And Arturo Tamayo and Maxine Alo, who are like bandmates at this point, worked with us again on the visuals
Jesse: I’m always down to write about heartbreak. It’s theraputic, and you learn a little bit more about yourself.
Moises: I don’t really care if Vincente Fernández was going through it. He needed to sing that to us.
Jesse: CRYCORE itself is ultimately about our breakup with Hessed. We’re just such sad boys, you know? [Laughs]
Moises: We learned how to fucking cry, dude, for real. The name “crycore” is tongue-in-cheek, though — it’s serious but it’s all funny too. People will tell us that our music is “really pain,” even if we think it’s not.
Siber: What’s a through-line for you both on CRYCORE?
Moises: Having it be really loud. I’m constantly wondering how high people set their volume when they play our music. I had to admit to myself recently that my favorite band is My Bloody Valentine.
Jesse: My version of that was Smashing Pumpkins.
Moises: I grew up playing in metal bands with full cabs, live compressors, overdrive pedals, huge racks; at the same time, I really love beautiful, melodic stuff. I think we both want something that’s loud but also piercing and tragic and heartbreaking in a way sad folk songs are. We used a lot more distortion on CRYCORE. More guitar usage. Heavy on the amps. We have some VST plugin with some sort of saturation effect on almost every element, including the drums. The one collaborator we had was our homie Taylor Dexter, who goes by taydex. I remember when he saw Jesse put everything through a drum buss, and he was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” [Laughs] We don’t have a lot of hardware, but Jesse’s amazing at really flavor-blasting sounds without overpowering the CPU.
Jesse: We had a little studio somewhere in Altadena where we did a lot of the finishing touches. Thankfully it wasn’t affected by the fires. I remember “Friends” starting from a dream I had with these melodies, writing, drums, everything. Even the pitch. Before I was more than half-awake, I had the setup ready to record bass. It wasn’t cohesive until I started putting it on paper — you know how dreams exponentially fade. Serum and YouTube tutorials played a big role across the project. Sometimes I’d tease Moises by playing something cheesy just to see how he reacts.
Moises: [Laughs]
Jesse: Putting ridiculous ad libs in there to see what Moises does.
Moises: We also know how to say no to each other. [Laughs]
Jesse: It’s a testament to how well we know each other.
Moises: I have a clip of taydex at the moment we play him a track that we had added another synth too, and he just goes, “Just what this song needed: more fucking instruments.” [Laughs]
Siber: You’ve got the mbv shoegaze influence — how about these BPMs and the internet rap delivery that pops up here and there?
Moises: After the metal band days, I moved into garage and noise during college, and then hip-hop after I graduated: Black Kray, Yung Lean, Drain Gang, Raider Klan, Goth Money. There was always rave stuff going on around L.A. too that friends would put on, so that’s partially where the speed and intensity come from. I go to raves more often than ‘regular’ shows. And then even if what we’re doing aesthetically doesn’t feel like rap, we’re still making a beat and adding vocals.
Jesse: I listened to a lot of the LA beats scene, Flying Lotus, stuff with bright, jazzy synths and deviations from that. It’s all a collage to me. Some people compare us to Crystal Castles now, though I didn’t listen to them much. I’m my own influence! Nah, I’m kidding. [Laughs] Animal Collective was a big one. Psychedelics influenced the approach to vocals. Lots of artists on SoundCloud…
Moises: Back when Jesse and I were still trying to figure out where our tastes met, we sort of landed on dinamarca because that’s kinda ambient with these reggaeton drums, which Jesse also likes making in his own projects. We both love the Cocteau Twins… We’re divided pretty evenly between listening to, like, Xaviersobased and A.R. Kane, 4AD, shoegaze. Learning about Crystal Castles was definitely a canon event for me in high school. I liked Awful Records, Danger Incorporated, which I feel were taking cues from Salem. Like, Yung Lean and Drain Gang were basically rapping over Salem beats on their earlier shit. Salem didn’t speak to me the right way at the time, but it’s interesting how things have a delayed effect sometimes. I grew up listening to Bjork on my iPod, but I didn’t really get obsessed until the past couple years. I think I’m more primed to listen to Salem now, but people bring them up a lot too.
Siber: Is there a particular moment of growth on CRYCORE that you feel you couldn’t pull off on Seven Channel Aura?
Moises: The way the beat comes in on “99tears” is a good example of getting all the levels to their max while keeping clarity, keeping it listenable. I think we were perfectionists with Seven Channel Aura, and I don’t say that as a positive. As an internal development, I’m proud that we were better about putting the paint brush down with CRYCORE. We can get something done in an evening now. Everything else was incremental improvements. The technical and songwriting leap for us happened between Dark Street Melodies, our second EP, and Seven Channel.
Siber: Your approach to vocals might be the Beli signature…
Jesse: You know how Kevin Shields has his whammy bar trick and Prince has his reverse gate reverb thing? We love putting guitar amps on our vocal chain.
Moises: Jesse started using that as an exciter to bring out the mid-range and have the vocals feel super present, along with all the other effects.
Jesse: You want the real sauce, bro? [Laughs]
Moises: The preamps and VSTs are expensive as fuck and a lot of them suck anyway. Pop vocal! Rock vocal! They’re very flat to me. I don’t know if Jesse wants to reveal the actual secrets…
Jesse: Nah, I don’t care. [Laughs] At first, I used the Ableton App and the Tony Maserati plugins with reverb, you know, to top it off, an Abbey Road compressor. I don’t know if it’s related to getting older, but I’ve been very sensitive to the dry/wet of everything now. I want to control how much it bleeds. We want vocal clarity, but we need you to feel like you're stepping into this cloud of energy too.
Beli get paid the moment you buy their music on Catalog.
