Retrosolo Finds Many Ways To Music

New Haven high-school student Miguel Loor, a.k.a. Retrosolo, found an online following for his music a few years ago, but truly found his place by planting his feet in the Elm City as a performer and show organizer, packing clubs and DIY spaces from Crunch House to Space Ballroom. Now, as he contemplates doing a few out-of-town shows, he also has a sense of things coming full circle.

Loor — who is almost 18, lives in New Haven, and is in his junior year at the Sound School — was 11 or 12 when he started writing songs. ​“Performance was generally not even a thought for me,” he said. During quarantine, ​“I didn’t have much else to do.” He recorded his first EP, Wolfcat, with his iPhone, using the headphones that came with the phone as a microphone for his voice and instruments and using GarageBand for the rest. He got good at getting it to sound good; ​“I think the word would be mixing, but back then I didn’t know what it was,” he said with a laugh. 

He kept at it, starting maybe 200 songs and finishing the ones that held the most promise. ​“For me I’ll be into a project and I’ll play around with it — but then at some point if I don’t like it I just stop,” he said. ​“If I like it I keep working on it.” Along the way, he expanded his home studio, moving from phone to computer and acquiring microphones, guitars, and other equipment he needed to keep developing his sound. ​“Now I’m just such a gear head. I have way too much,” he said.

Loor released Wolfcat in May 2020, ​“the summer of quarantine,” he said. He filmed one music video, for a song called ​“Trust Fall,” with a high school friend who since already graduated. ​“I was about to be a freshman and he was a sophomore,” Loor said. ​“It wasn’t silly but it was very novice.” But ​“I made a couple TikToks about it.” TikTok wasn’t as big a deal then as it is now, and ​“the artist market was not as saturated, so it got a lot of traction,” Loor said. ​“I had the tiniest bit of blowup,” getting tens of thousands of views. ​“I was 15 and had no clue what to do about it.” By the end of the summer he had about 2,000 monthly listeners. ​“I think I got anxiety from it,” he said. It turned out to be the impetus for a turn toward the community immediately around him, even if ​“still I have a bunch of people from random places who listen to my old song.”

Loor starting honing his mixing skills first by learning from YouTube videos. ​“The general stuff of just creating music doesn’t come that unnaturally to me,” he said. But ​“one of the big reasons I was able to improve is because of Sam Carlson.… I DMed him and said ​‘I want to up my production.’” He mentioned that he had a couple songs. Carlson wrote him back fast, and before long, Loor was visiting Carlson at Sans Serif Recording on Chapel Street.

“When I went there, we just started talking about mixing,” Loor said. ​“He told me I had a knack for it — I just needed to learn why it sounded good.” Loor shadowed Carlson for a year and a half. ​“I basically interned at his studio and learned so much from him,” Loor said. ​“He’s a friend and one of my biggest mentors.… I would not have made it as far as I am right now without Sam.” In addition, ​“when I first started performing, he did drums for me.”

Loor’s first live show happened at the MAC, the performing space of the Milford Arts Council, after approaching young music organizers Zane Birks and Luke McDonald about getting onto the bill of a concert they were organizing there. They heard his music and agreed, and the show happened in May 2022, coinciding with the release of his second EP, Slacker Son. ​“It was me, Sam and one of my friends on synth,” Loor said, with the sound fleshed out by backing tracks Loor and Carlson had made from his recordings. ​“We were able to pull it off.”

The show drew about 200 people, including members of Esmer and Pond View, ​“a bunch of these bands I’m really close to now,” Loor said. ​“It was definitely an experience, and it made me experience such a high amount of adrenaline that I’ve been chasing it ever since.”

Just as important, Loor said, ​“I quickly realized there was a scene here,” made up of older high-school and college students, who were forming bands and going to shows. ​“It made me see that I could do that” — to be a part of it, as a musician, audience member, and organizer. ​“I became a part of their crew.”

Regarding putting shows together, ​“I just saw the way Luke was doing it, and it seemed fun to me,” Loor said. He organized his first show in August at the West Haven DIY spot Crunch House (which recently shut down), after he had run the sound board there for another show. ​“I approached them to do a show there and they were super-open to it.”

“I pretty much handled it the way I saw a lot of people do it,” he said. ​“It seems like a lot of work but it’s also really fun.” It involved contacting musicians to see if they wanted to play, and then getting the word out through flyers and social media. It helped that he knew musicians who were ready to hit the stage. ​“We just want to perform — we love it,” he said. He got about 80 people to turn out for that first show.

“I think throwing shows is not as hard as people think it is, if you can surround yourself with a bunch of artists who passionate about what they’re doing,” Loor said. ​“They’re just so down to make events and do art.”

After performing at the State House with fellow young musician Ammar, Loor decided to try to organize a show for Space Ballroom. ​“I had approached Luke about the idea of doing our first co-hosting show together,” Loor said, and proposed the Hamden club. ​“Luke, being the sane person that he is,” was skeptical, Loor recalled. But ​“I think it never hurts to try, so I just try something hard, and it works half the time,” he said with a laugh.

He stacked the proposal with himself, Esmer, Pond View, and T!lt, all young, energetic New Haven-area bands. ​“I contacted the Space Ballroom guys” — in particular, Mark Nussbaum, who had cut his teeth as a teenager promoting shows in New Haven — ​“and I approached them with a bill, and they were super-down.” He then added Rhode Island-based band Superposition to the bill, and the lineup was complete.

That show, in November, drew about 250 people. ​“We almost sold it out,” Loor said. ​“It made me realize that local cool is so much more impactful than people think.” Being able to fill a club in town ​“can help you have that kind of credibility in other places.”

A show he organized at Devil’s Gear in January likewise drew about 100 people. This time it was him as the local draw for three out-of-town bands: Colebert from Hartford, Wally from Boston, and Rockgati from Storrs. ​“Again, the universe going my way,” Loor said. ​“This show meant a lot to me because I knew that whoever was going to show up, I was the local pull,” he said. The crowd showed up ​“by the time the first band started,” and Loor went on last. ​“Not a single person had left. I saw a bunch of people who were my artist friends. I just said ​‘how are we doing tonight?’ and the whole room exploded.” Among the crowd were ​“a lot of people I didn’t know,” he added, and ​“so many people knew the lyrics to my songs. It blew my mind.”

Last Saturday Retrosolo shared a bill with Nehway, Tyler Goldchain, and The Wes Lewis Digital Combo. The show was mostly low-key R&B. ​“By the time we came on” — Retrosolo’s current lineup being Loor on vocals and guitar, Gem on bass, Kevin Loeu on guitar, and Izzy De La Cruz on drums — ​“everyone just needed to jump around,” Loor said. ​“All these people who were so nice and respectful” during the preceding sets were ​“moshing, shouting all my lyrics back at me. At the end of the set, I had the most gorgeous moment, where we had already played all the songs,” and the crowd asked for one more.

The problem: The band didn’t know any other of Loor’s songs. Loor thought about how to make it happen anyway. ​“I sat down at the front of the stage, put the mic on the floor. The second I did that, everyone just sat down too.” He then sang a ​“stripped down” song, and ​“I was tearing up by the end of it, because it was so many people listening to me. I told them they were amazing.”

That was when the feeling of the past few years coming full circle hit Loor, as it was just ​“me and my guitar — that’s how I started, that’s how I was doing it, before I even got a phone or a microphone,” he said. ​“I think I’m never going to forget that moment. It made me 10 times more thankful for the way I’m progressing now.”

Loor is now finishing up a run of shows, one in Hartford on Saturday and another show at Gather East. What’s ​“really, really next is that I’m planning an East Coast tour for April and May,” he said, which he’ll put together through the connections he has already made. He’s also working on his first full-length album.

All of this makes Loor feel sometimes as though he’s living a double life. At the Sound School, he said, ​“I have a couple people come up to me and go ​‘how is the music thing going?’ I think it’s good for me. It keeps me humble and it keeps me motivated. They don’t know what I’m doing because I haven’t done enough yet.”

“I’m super-stubborn, so it gives me a little push,” he added. But ​“I’m really just chasing an endless adrenaline high that I know I’m never going to get off of.” He’s seen multiple paths into music; whether mixing, performing, writing, recording, or organizing, he said, ​“I know I want to do this for the rest of my life.”