Music as a Freewheeling Adventure with Divino Niño

Written by Emily Fender

Photographed by Lila Barth

We all pile into a green room in the back of the Music Hall of Williamsburg, teetering between drowsy and buzzed while one of the boys starts to brew some tea. Based out of Chicago, Divino Niño has evolved and changed since they first began their project. They dance through a sound that is warm and nostalgic in a distinctly hypnotic way, a feeling you can easily find woven into each of their albums. Their music and friendship is driven by a “come what may” attitude that contently embraces the organic flow of everything. There is something incredibly peaceful and charming in meeting a group of happy people that collectively seem to be very at peace with their lives. It’s worked well for them—the group’s first album Pool Jealousy came out in 2014 and they’ve been plugging along since, adding members along the way.

Camilo Medina (guitar and vocals), Javier Forero (bass and vocals), and Guillermo Rodriguez Torres (guitar) were roommates in Chicago together when Divino Niño started. Javier and Camilo go back to their earlier years in Colombia and Miami, cutting their teeth in a Christian hard-core group. Soon after the three began working together as roommates, Pierce Codina (drums) joined the project, with Justin Vittori (bongos, keys, and more) now being the most recent addition. They are a happy unit, enthusiastically engaging with the Chicago scene while also gravitating back towards each other. According to Camilo they’ve “already been in the soup together” which makes it easy to cultivate a specific happy vibe in the project. 

Camilo Medina and Javier Forero

Chicago facilitates this well for them, each having been there for at least six years and Justin growing up there. For him in particular, Chicago has proven to be a perfect community, lovingly recounting a gigantic music community basketball fundraiser tournament. On an even closer level, Guillermo explains that their group is “also like a support group just cause Chicago winter gets so rough. If you didn’t need to leave the house, kinda why would you?” He says it pulls them out of their houses and into practice spaces together, “and then you see your friends and you’re like ah, it’s not all just darkness and ice!”

For most of them, Divino Niño is the catch-all for any ideas or demos they individually generate instead of rotating between projects. Javier explains this mindset: “I know bands that are just like, ‘I wrote this track that feels completely different from this project’, and for some reason I just never think like that. I’m just like if I write something that’s just completely different I think it’s just cool to bring it to the band, just cause it adds to the textures and the different colors and mix, as opposed to ‘I’m going for R&B neo-goth’ or whatever.” And they certainly do pull inspiration from many wells, with Camilo later chiming in that he found inspiration in Ryan Gosling’s ukulele part in Blue Valentine and Pierce in meditating. Some of the boys also fondly recount childhood influences. Camilo recounts daydreaming in civics class about being a member of Blink-182 and Justin, falling asleep as a kid listening to Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose.” Justin also has found his well-loved place in the band by filling the niche position of bongo player (“my bongos are my gateways into all the bands I play for”) among other instruments.

Justin Vittori

In this light, listening to Divino Niño becomes even more entertaining. They insist that their music happens organically and is what feels right to them. Camilo says that the writing and recording process is shared with no one person directing the group, and that “sometimes the thing’s gotta be what it’s meant to be, and we’re just doing the work of letting it fall where it’s supposed to fall.” When someone brings something fun or interesting, Camilo describes it as finding a little puzzle piece and the rest of the team working as detectives, but the work seems to be almost more akin to excavation than construction. “It’s like going to the source rather than the decoration,” Pierce adds, “so it’s this song that you feel—what is it saying, rather than what specific sounds are these?”

This process of unearthing and finding what’s just right becomes slightly more directed as they switch between Spanish and English. They explain that the lyrics are just as they come and never pre-planned, woven in with deliberate tendencies regarding phonetics. Javier adds that “sometimes certain words sound cooler [in one language over the other], as if it were like another instrument,” continuing that sometimes “it’s cool to hear this almost percussive sound or phrasing that sounds different. It’s like different textures.” This comes up, for example, in “Maria” off of Foam, which is sung entirely in Spanish. The song is filled with distinct patterns in the sounds of the words that Camilo stresses as he sings, “chaqueta de licor” or “y aquí me cago yo.” His voice and enunciation perfectly weaving into the rhythm and mood of the song.

Pierce Codina and Guillermo Rodriguez Torres

All of this builds into a specific atmosphere of their sound and ecosystem. Their music is one that I can feel, the waves of emotion reminding me of what it might be like in a sensory deprivation tank (less Altered States, more a happy trip). It’s a type of ambience I want to swim in and touch. It’s so apt that they have frequently mentioned an underwater theme to their latest album Foam— their music certainly could be the soundtrack to a psychedelic ecosystem teeming with syrupy, vibrant colors with the latest album being merely an aquatic addition to it all. This is no accident, as the boys express a deeply rooted interest in building this kind of multi-sensory experience. Camilo brings up the recent film The Lighthouse, “I felt like I could touch every sound” when he first saw it. This tactile sensory experience really stuck with him: “I remember thinking it’d be sick to not only create sounds that you feel like you could put your hand on, but an accumulation of all those sounds to build a world for you […] that you could touch with your ears.”

For the short time I was with them, it was very clear the extent to which all of them have such a genuine love for their music and each other—plugging along with demos and shows seems to be as natural in their friendship as catching up over coffee. They have certainly been in the soup together with cherished results, and seem to have a perfect inclination towards balancing each other out and teasing out some of the best parts of one another, and a wonderful part of this happy union they just so happen to print on vinyl.

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