Xenia Rubinos: Making Musical “Magic” in Greenpoint

Avant-garde indie artist Xenia Rubinos came to New York, knowing that music was her life mission. She began making choices to move farther along that path, starting with her apartment in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, feeling it was the right place to nurture her art. Ms. Rubinos tellsBrooklyn Roads that she had “fallen in love with Brooklyn,” even before she moved here.

The apartment became a part-time music café, as she hosted a concert series right in her living room. That afforded her the opportunity to “meet a lot of local Brooklyn artists and creative people working in all kinds of different mediums, from chefs to dancers to musicians to visual artists” and gave her a great way to explore their inspirations. She says, “Gowanus has so much history and a kind of mystique.  It’s been a great place to cultivate my art and to write music.”

Eventually she left Gowanus for Greenpoint, and while she again found herself living near another body of polluted water (Newton Creek), her creativity never stopped flowing. Her new neighborhood has a markedly different ambiance, but she tells us that she feels fortunate to live in a space where she has a basement studio, where she recorded her debut album, “Magic Trix,” last summer. Ms. Rubinos says that the space “was a really big part of the recording process of this album and came through the creation of the music – where I wrote it, where I was working on it, with my co-producer and drummer, Marco Buccelli. Being able to record it there made all the difference, because we just had the freedom to relax and take our time, as opposed to going to a more sterile studio space, so that definitely played into the sound of the record.”

Ms. Rubinos was drawn toward music from an early age and was encouraged by her parents, who supported her musical inclinations. Her father bought her a piano when she was four years old. “I don’t come from a musical family, but I consider them to be musical,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. “Even though they don’t play instruments, they’re very creative people. My father is Cuban, raised in a pretty conservative family, and had a lot of inspiration from opera and classical music. My mother is Puerto Rican and she is also very passionate about music – more salsa and Hispanic dance and chorus music.”

Xenia Rubinos has created a unique sound that bears traces of indie rock, Spanish folk, R&B and punk that are evident not only on her debut album, but also in her live shows . She has performed at South by Southwest, The Latin Alternative Music Conference and Deli Magazine’s Best Emerging Artist Fest, as well as at a number of Brooklyn venues, including BAM Café Live, Public Assembly, Glasslands, Union Pool, Cameo and the The Rock Shop.