About Todo
I was born in Montevideo on the 20th of September of 1978 under the name Javier Zugarramurdi Garcia and today I like to be called by the name I choose for myself, Todo. In my mother language, that name means everything. The name came to me after being on an electronic music party in Berlin on the first of January of 2020 when a girl asked me in Spanish, are you an Art Director? I replied, “Soy todo” I am everything. An impulsive way to tell her that I am an Art Director, Designer, Musician, Photographer, Painter…
“I really love the idea of keeping the doors open for wherever my soul takes me in the future.”
In 1984 I started primary school at the Waldorf Schule in Montevideo, where I started playing flute, xylophone and to paint. Most importantly this school helped me to be free on my creativity and life.
When I was 10 years old in 1988 I remember recording cassettes with my favorite songs from the radio. And doing it every night before bedtime, with my headphones on and my eyes closed while I listened. And there my love for music began. I also remember being drawing a lot while I was listening on my walkmans to the recorded cassettes. Drawing was also something special for me, as a tool to bring to this world the images from my imagination. I remember listening to all kinds of music, and it was such an adventure to be always discovering new songs. Music was with drawing a very important part of my life.
At 15 years old in 1993 I convinced my dear mother and psychologist Mabel Garcia to get me a drum-set and I started playing in my basement for hours and hours when I met my dear friend Val Guillemette Novoa. He was coming from Buenos Aires to visit his grandmother who was living very close to my house. At that time in Uruguay with no internet, the music was coming or from parents or the radio and it was more old-school or commercial. But Val brought a whole new spectrum of music like Hendrix, Janes Addiction, Mr. Bungle, Rage, Faith no more, Beast Boys, Alice in Chains, Living Colour and all the alternative music from the 90s. That for me was a life changer.
Val came to Montevideo with his guitar, a Fender Stratocaster Plus with a Mesa Boogie amp, so we jammed for hours in my basement and smoked a lot of weed and listened to all that music. We composed a bunch of tracks and invited a bass player I knew to join the band. We named the band Bulbo Maestro, referring to the collective consciousness, is like when you ingest L.S.D. with more people and they all see the same hallucination, the master brain. We did a party on the roof of a house and we played our songs for the people. And that was my first time of many to perform in front of an audience.
Djing and Performing
By coincidence or destiny on a Thursday night around 1994, we arrived at a club with some friends, Manolo, El Flaco, Dalmiro (RIP) and others I don’t remember. When entering there it was super dark and a new kind of music was playing loud, there I saw for the first time in my life a techno DJ playing records. I felt like seeing myself on that DJ booth and there I knew I was going to do that. Sometime after I talked with a friend, Gonzalo Baubeta, who brought 2 turntables and a mixer to Montevideo and he wanted to play the drums so we exchanged his DJ gear for my drum-set, he also handed me the first music-making software for what I will be eternally grateful.
Again by coincidence or destiny I met a guy who was coming from the states with a bag full of techno and house records and I bought them, so immediately I started beat matching and mixing records and it came very easy and natural for me. Very soon I was contacted by the guy that was doing the parties in where I had my first encounter with electronic music. The name of the DJ was Bruno Gervais and he was coming from France with his Uruguayan boyfriend Diego. Bruno was the DJ that brought the spice in electronic music to Uruguay and I was the first Uruguayan to became DJ influenced by him and followed by a big linage of other DJs like DJ Koolt, Nicolas Lutz or Omar to name a few that also followed the “Gervais School”. The “Gervais School” consisted of mixing all sorts of underground electronic music such as House, Techno, Electro, Trance and all you could mix smoothly to tell a story with your records. I played countless sets in Uruguay under the name “Javier Z” for many years, I got an award from local radio and opened for a well-known band in Latin America called Babasonicos until I left to Europe in 2002 to expand my horizons. Since then I played sets in many countries with different names like Xavi Zeta the years living in Spain and Zûg while living in Germany. Today I very much enjoy playing in open-air clubs like the local Club der Visionære and I am working on an audio-visual live set that keeps me entertained and excited.
Design
While my encounters with electronic music were happening in Uruguay I was studying a career in Visual Communication with Argentinean graphic designer Hugo Alíes. In there I was always listening to music while I was making collages, painting, creating designs, branding and learning all the design software.
I need to thank my father and accountant Mario Zugarramurdi for guiding me on choosing a career in design. That gave me freedom to play or do the music I wanted without the pressure of making some music for sale. Nowadays I earn my bread doing websites and designs and I freely record music just for love. Although I always end up making records and releases with it.
Graphic and web design are great compliments for music makers like me in order to materialize artworks and media. And creative work like music is a form of art that gives you the great feeling of bringing ideas to life. Like the record pictured here, which I recorded, mastered, photographed and designed in 2018.
Music Production
I think I started to create my first electronic music tracks at the end of the 90s, I remember putting some of the first tracks in my DJ sets and the people at that time could not believe that I was able to create electronic music myself. The internet was only starting to appear at the time. I was spending many hours creating music for many years with a lot of passion and in 2008 living in Spain the digital music era was on its beginnings so I started my first digital record label distributed by Juno Download and started putting releases with my music. Soon after I was also releasing the music from friends from Uruguay such as Muten, Z@p, Coya, and others. I was also making the designs and started creating new concepts and ideas for releases, creating new monikers for myself presenting different kinds of music and registering them into Discogs which was since the beginning the biggest music encyclopedia that helped me discover lots of new music for decades.
In 2017 after 6 years of living in Berlin, the capital of electronic music in the world, I got the opportunity for the first time to release music in my favorite format Vinyl. It happened that I was selling some of the records of my collection in Discos and some guy called Whoann came into my house to pick them up while I was recording new music, and he told me to send some tracks to him, so I did and sometime after my first track in vinyl was out on Minor Planet Music. At that time I realized I was sitting on hundreds of tracks so I made a selection of about 60 and sent them to some vinyl record labels such as Slow Life or Imprints among others. Soon after, Domenico Rosa from Imprints Records replied and told me he was opening a new label and my music was fitting on it and he selected 8 tracks to make 2 records. So 2018 saw the light my first solo record ever PROS001 with the privilege of opening for the label Propersound Records. The record came out first as a white label limited edition of 150 and some people paid up to 10 times the price of the record to have it in their collections and that took me to sign a pressing and distribution deal with the same distributor, Subwax. That was like a dream come true to me, so I made my own selection from my hundreds of tracks and started my own record label Zûg with 2 records entitled “Algunos Sentimientos” which translates to “Some feelings” and contains tracks like “Love”, “Happiness”, “Beauty” and other positive feelings bringing to the world good vibrations. The records where very well received having great reviews from the biggest record shops in the world. Now the third part is out in 2020 as a double album containing 8 more feelings.
Audio-Visual
Connecting audio with visuals is also something I have passion about. In the audio-visual part of this website you can see and hear some examples on how it feels to experience the connection with sound connected with visuals in real time. In addition now I am controlling them with body movements to make this new art more expensive than ever. Here is the newest recording over a green screen on May 2021.
Painting
I had being experimenting with different painting techniques for many many years now and thanks to my 2 small kids I accidentally discover my best way to express feelings with paint. Looking for things to do with them to keep them entertained we started painting together, so we grabbed a very big cardboard (110x110cm) that was heading the thrash and we covered with blue acrylic paint to then start splashing colors on top of it ending with such a nice result that lead me to paste it on a board and hanged it frameless at the entrance of our house. The result was so pleasant that I decided To do a series of these on canvas, my daughter helped me with the first one but then she abandoned me, the results where even better that our first experiment so we hanged some more at the house. Soon after we started to have random visits of people who saw the paintings and I end up selling almost all of them, with the exception of the ones I made with my kids, those are priceless to me.
After the accidental success with the 90x90cm canvas series, I kept experimenting more and more with the technique to end up with a collection of 14 120x80cm paintings that is waiting for my first exhibition that is delayed by the actual situation. As I do in music I like to express feelings through my paintings too. So they have titles like Harmony, Calm or positive messages like Hacelo (Do it!). This paintings are made with such passion and good vibe that can only bring joy to the spaces they live in. In conclusion, the feeling of accomplishment you get by creating beautiful things can no other than filling your heart and soul with happiness.
Photography
I always loved to take pictures but it wasn’t until 2019 that I decided to purchase my first professional camera and started taking the photography seriously. Before I was not pleased with the resolution and quality of the pictures and I thought my kids deserved to have good quality pictures of themselves when they grow up. So I started to make tons of portraits of my kids in full resolution and I was finally pleased.
Getting more into photography I discovered I needed to buy a basic lens, the 50mm. After purchasing this lens and started doing tests I was astonished by the quality and resolution of it. So I decided to go for a photographic tour around the neighborhood, I end up in a train bridge taking the typical Berlin TV tower picture and kept on walking to find a car wash, and I went like, “Oh, this is nice”. There was a guy washing the cars and I went around the corner and saw the side of the car-wash, I saw the shot, and took it, then I kept on going with my tour. Soon I was starting to freeze so I went back home. After making a tea I started checking the pictures and I saw the car-wash one, opened the picture in my editor, quickly equalized it, and save it. After, I could not stop staring at it and felt so thankful for my photo-trip. This picture symbolized my birth in professional photography because I felt like printing it in big, so I made my first large format print (80x120cm) without doing any previous tests, and the translation from digital to print was outstanding.
Incredibly the following week I purchased a used sofa from someone living not far from my house. This person was curious enough to click on the link on the footer of my email to discover my recently took car-wash picture and after being impressed by it he contacted a friend of his, the well known photographer Sabine Wild who was also impressed by the picture and some of my audiovisual work. So she came to meet me at my home and I showed her my prints, paintings and visuals and we talk about presenting my art in Berlin.
Being appreciated by professionals gave me the courage to start selling pictures on and offline and surprisingly my photos are starting to give life to many homes in Berlin and the world. I could never think it would pay off so badly. It was again the compensation of doing.
“You can do whatever you choose in life. You just need to do it, it will make you happy. Listen to your inner-self.”
Todo.
About Todo
I was born in Montevideo on the 20th of September of 1978 under the name Javier Zugarramurdi Garcia and today I like to be called by the name I choose for myself, Todo. In my mother language, that name means everything. The name came to me after being on an electronic music party in Berlin on the first of January of 2020 when a girl asked me in Spanish, are you an Art Director? I replied, “Soy todo” I am everything. An impulsive way to tell her that I am an Art Director, Designer, Musician, Photographer, Painter…
“I really love the idea of keeping the doors open for wherever my soul takes me in the future.”
In 1984 I started primary school at the Waldorf Schule in Montevideo, where I started playing flute, xylophone and to paint. Most importantly this school helped me to be free on my creativity and life.
When I was 10 years old in 1988 I remember recording cassettes with my favorite songs from the radio. And doing it every night before bedtime, with my headphones on and my eyes closed while I listened. And there my love for music began. I also remember being drawing a lot while I was listening on my walkmans to the recorded cassettes. Drawing was also something special for me, as a tool to bring to this world the images from my imagination. I remember listening to all kinds of music, and it was such an adventure to be always discovering new songs. Music was with drawing a very important part of my life.
At 15 years old in 1993 I convinced my dear mother and psychologist Mabel Garcia to get me a drum-set and I started playing in my basement for hours and hours when I met my dear friend Val Guillemette Novoa. He was coming from Buenos Aires to visit his grandmother who was living very close to my house. At that time in Uruguay with no internet, the music was coming or from parents or the radio and it was more old-school or commercial. But Val brought a whole new spectrum of music like Hendrix, Janes Addiction, Mr. Bungle, Rage, Faith no more, Beast Boys, Alice in Chains, Living Colour and all the alternative music from the 90s. That for me was a life changer.
Val came to Montevideo with his guitar, a Fender Stratocaster Plus with a Mesa Boogie amp, so we jammed for hours in my basement and smoked a lot of weed and listened to all that music. We composed a bunch of tracks and invited a bass player I knew to join the band. We named the band Bulbo Maestro, referring to the collective consciousness, is like when you ingest L.S.D. with more people and they all see the same hallucination, the master brain. We did a party on the roof of a house and we played our songs for the people. And that was my first time of many to perform in front of an audience.
Djing and Performing
By coincidence or destiny on a Thursday night around 1994, we arrived at a club with some friends, Manolo, El Flaco, Dalmiro (RIP) and others I don’t remember. When entering there it was super dark and a new kind of music was playing loud, there I saw for the first time in my life a techno DJ playing records. I felt like seeing myself on that DJ booth and there I knew I was going to do that. Sometime after I talked with a friend, Gonzalo Baubeta, who brought 2 turntables and a mixer to Montevideo and he wanted to play the drums so we exchanged his DJ gear for my drum-set, he also handed me the first music-making software for what I will be eternally grateful.
Again by coincidence or destiny I met a guy who was coming from the states with a bag full of techno and house records and I bought them, so immediately I started beat matching and mixing records and it came very easy and natural for me. Very soon I was contacted by the guy that was doing the parties in where I had my first encounter with electronic music. The name of the DJ was Bruno Gervais and he was coming from France with his Uruguayan boyfriend Diego. Bruno was the DJ that brought the spice in electronic music to Uruguay and I was the first Uruguayan to became DJ influenced by him and followed by a big linage of other DJs like DJ Koolt, Nicolas Lutz or Omar to name a few that also followed the “Gervais School”. The “Gervais School” consisted of mixing all sorts of underground electronic music such as House, Techno, Electro, Trance and all you could mix smoothly to tell a story with your records. I played countless sets in Uruguay under the name “Javier Z” for many years, I got an award from local radio and opened for a well-known band in Latin America called Babasonicos until I left to Europe in 2002 to expand my horizons. Since then I played sets in many countries with different names like Xavi Zeta the years living in Spain and Zûg while living in Germany. Today I very much enjoy playing in open-air clubs like the local Club der Visionære and I am working on an audio-visual live set that keeps me entertained and excited.
Design
While my encounters with electronic music were happening in Uruguay I was studying a career in Visual Communication with Argentinean graphic designer Hugo Alíes. In there I was always listening to music while I was making collages, painting, creating designs, branding and learning all the design software.
I need to thank my father and accountant Mario Zugarramurdi for guiding me on choosing a career in design. That gave me freedom to play or do the music I wanted without the pressure of making some music for sale. Nowadays I earn my bread doing websites and designs and I freely record music just for love. Although I always end up making records and releases with it.
Graphic and web design are great compliments for music makers like me in order to materialize artworks and media. And creative work like music is a form of art that gives you the great feeling of bringing ideas to life. Like the record pictured here, which I recorded, mastered, photographed and designed in 2018.
Music Production
I think I started to create my first electronic music tracks at the end of the 90s, I remember putting some of the first tracks in my DJ sets and the people at that time could not believe that I was able to create electronic music myself. The internet was only starting to appear at the time. I was spending many hours creating music for many years with a lot of passion and in 2008 living in Spain the digital music era was on its beginnings so I started my first digital record label distributed by Juno Download and started putting releases with my music. Soon after I was also releasing the music from friends from Uruguay such as Muten, Z@p, Coya, and others. I was also making the designs and started creating new concepts and ideas for releases, creating new monikers for myself presenting different kinds of music and registering them into Discogs which was since the beginning the biggest music encyclopedia that helped me discover lots of new music for decades.
In 2017 after 6 years of living in Berlin, the capital of electronic music in the world, I got the opportunity for the first time to release music in my favorite format Vinyl. It happened that I was selling some of the records of my collection in Discos and some guy called Whoann came into my house to pick them up while I was recording new music, and he told me to send some tracks to him, so I did and sometime after my first track in vinyl was out on Minor Planet Music. At that time I realized I was sitting on hundreds of tracks so I made a selection of about 60 and sent them to some vinyl record labels such as Slow Life or Imprints among others. Soon after, Domenico Rosa from Imprints Records replied and told me he was opening a new label and my music was fitting on it and he selected 8 tracks to make 2 records. So 2018 saw the light my first solo record ever PROS001 with the privilege of opening for the label Propersound Records. The record came out first as a white label limited edition of 150 and some people paid up to 10 times the price of the record to have it in their collections and that took me to sign a pressing and distribution deal with the same distributor, Subwax. That was like a dream come true to me, so I made my own selection from my hundreds of tracks and started my own record label Zûg with 2 records entitled “Algunos Sentimientos” which translates to “Some feelings” and contains tracks like “Love”, “Happiness”, “Beauty” and other positive feelings bringing to the world good vibrations. The records where very well received having great reviews from the biggest record shops in the world. Now the third part is out in 2020 as a double album containing 8 more feelings.
Audio-Visual
Connecting audio with visuals is also something I have passion about. In the audio-visual part of this website you can see and hear some examples on how it feels to experience the connection with sound connected with visuals in real time. In addition now I am controlling them with body movements to make this new art more expensive than ever. Here is the newest recording over a green screen on May 2021.
Painting
I had being experimenting with different painting techniques for many many years now and thanks to my 2 small kids I accidentally discover my best way to express feelings with paint. Looking for things to do with them to keep them entertained we started painting together, so we grabbed a very big cardboard (110x110cm) that was heading the thrash and we covered with blue acrylic paint to then start splashing colors on top of it ending with such a nice result that lead me to paste it on a board and hanged it frameless at the entrance of our house. The result was so pleasant that I decided To do a series of these on canvas, my daughter helped me with the first one but then she abandoned me, the results where even better that our first experiment so we hanged some more at the house. Soon after we started to have random visits of people who saw the paintings and I end up selling almost all of them, with the exception of the ones I made with my kids, those are priceless to me.
After the accidental success with the 90x90cm canvas series, I kept experimenting more and more with the technique to end up with a collection of 14 120x80cm paintings that is waiting for my first exhibition that is delayed by the actual situation. As I do in music I like to express feelings through my paintings too. So they have titles like Harmony, Calm or positive messages like Hacelo (Do it!). This paintings are made with such passion and good vibe that can only bring joy to the spaces they live in. In conclusion, the feeling of accomplishment you get by creating beautiful things can no other than filling your heart and soul with happiness.
Photography
I always loved to take pictures but it wasn’t until 2019 that I decided to purchase my first professional camera and started taking the photography seriously. Before I was not pleased with the resolution and quality of the pictures and I thought my kids deserved to have good quality pictures of themselves when they grow up. So I started to make tons of portraits of my kids in full resolution and I was finally pleased.
Getting more into photography I discovered I needed to buy a basic lens, the 50mm. After purchasing this lens and started doing tests I was astonished by the quality and resolution of it. So I decided to go for a photographic tour around the neighborhood, I end up in a train bridge taking the typical Berlin TV tower picture and kept on walking to find a car wash, and I went like, “Oh, this is nice”. There was a guy washing the cars and I went around the corner and saw the side of the car-wash, I saw the shot, and took it, then I kept on going with my tour. Soon I was starting to freeze so I went back home. After making a tea I started checking the pictures and I saw the car-wash one, opened the picture in my editor, quickly equalized it, and save it. After, I could not stop staring at it and felt so thankful for my photo-trip. This picture symbolized my birth in professional photography because I felt like printing it in big, so I made my first large format print (80x120cm) without doing any previous tests, and the translation from digital to print was outstanding.
Incredibly the following week I purchased a used sofa from someone living not far from my house. This person was curious enough to click on the link on the footer of my email to discover my recently took car-wash picture and after being impressed by it he contacted a friend of his, the well known photographer Sabine Wild who was also impressed by the picture and some of my audiovisual work. So she came to meet me at my home and I showed her my prints, paintings and visuals and we talk about presenting my art in Berlin.
Being appreciated by professionals gave me the courage to start selling pictures on and offline and surprisingly my photos are starting to give life to many homes in Berlin and the world. I could never think it would pay off so badly. It was again the compensation of doing.
“You can do whatever you choose in life. You just need to do it, it will make you happy. Listen to your inner-self.”
Todo.