“It’s a limitless pool of inspiration, like accessing a different world,” says Cuban American musician Sabrina Fuentes of her vivid dreams
This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“Peaceful sleep has eluded me for as long as I can remember. By the time I was 15, I was experiencing sleep paralysis every night, along with these violent nightmares about things like my family being murdered, or Bob from Twin Peaks slowly rising out of the darkness. I basically didn’t sleep for a year, until I visited family in Cuba and underwent an exorcism to remove any spirits attached to me. You know how a certain smell can transport you back to a specific time and place? It felt a bit like that, and the nightmares stopped for a long time. They eventually came back – not helped by me living in a bunch of haunted houses in London – but I’ve since found I just don’t have the energy to be truly scared any more.
“When I was younger, I always felt like I created my best work on those nights I couldn’t sleep. Now I find entire songs can come to me in the space between sleep and waking, or a lyric will appear fully formed in a dream. It’s a limitless pool of inspiration, like accessing a different world. To me, communicating with the other side is a gift, not something that should be feared.”
Between modelling for Marc Jacobs and supporting the art-rock provocateur Yves Tumor on tour as part of the rock outfit Pretty Sick, the Cuban American musician Sabrina Fuentes has packed more than most into her 24 years. Raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Fuentes was a precocious teen: she formed Pretty Sick at the tender age of 13, and after internships at VFiles and Helmut Lang, relocated to London to study music at Goldsmiths five years later. The band’s distortion-drenched debut album, Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile, followed in 2022, via the independent label Dirty Hit. On their latest EP, Streetwise – whose release was accompanied by the launch of Fuentes’s new clothing line, PS, sold in Heaven by Marc Jacobs stores – electronic production has been added to her self-lacerating songwriting. “I spend more time at raves and at clubs than I do at DIY venues at this point,” she says with a shrug. “So it feels like a natural progression.”
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.