No Rome
Life and career[edit]
Early life[edit]
Guendoline Rome Viray Gomez[1] grew up in the suburb of San Francisco del Monte within Manila.[2] His father was a former DJ and his mother a church singer, while his younger sister Gabriel performed under the name Aunt Robert and his older brother Zeon under the name U-Pistol,[3] short for Ulzzang Pistol.[4] He grew up listening to My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, and later electronic artists such as Björk and Aphex Twin.[5] Growing up, he became interested in visual art after taking pictures with his father's camera, and spent extended periods on Flickr and later Tumblr, on the grounds that its contents were annotated with information for further research;[6] he was later inspired to start writing after reading books of poems by artists such as Frank O'Hara and Robert Frost.[7]
Personal life and artistry[edit]
Gomez spent a period misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, for which he took antipsychotic medication; he later wrote the It's All Smiles album track "Secret Beach" about his experiences.[6] In a December 2021 interview with Vice, he stated that It's All Smiles had been influenced by My Bloody Valentine, Nujabes, and the Avalanches,[32] and a March 2022 edition of Out of Print noted that his influences spanned the Deftones, jungle producer Goldie, and the light art pioneers Jenny Holzer and Nam June Paik, and that his "ultimate musical hero" was Kim Gordon.[3]
Gomez describes his music as "shoegaze R&B", although in a scathing review of It's All Smiles, the Guardian argued that the two terms were contradictory, on the grounds that shoegaze was a genre in which "singers sink in quicksands of guitar", and R&B was a genre often dependent on the quality of the vocalist, and noted that his choice "to foreground his thin, trebly voice and treat it with endless effects [... owed] more to hyperpop than anything else"; they also described the album's "A Place Where Nobody Knows" and "Everything" as chillwave, and described the album as a "hyperpop headache".[1]