Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Ernesto Montiel is a visual artist and improviser, formally educated in architecture. He has been dj-ing since his teens. Ernesto moved to Dallas in 2015.

He took the Mutarrancho name for dj gigs since the beginning of 2016, usually in experimental music, jazz and certain kind of latin music shows. He has dj-ed for No Idea previously (2017, 2018, 2019), and also for Sonic Transmissions Festival in 2017 and 2019.

First active in Venezuela, Ernesto’s initial improvisation project was an open collective called El Jaibo (1995) which spawned several other projects, including: Los Jardineros del Chance, and Metra. In 2016 he began playing with Miguel Espinel as the electroacoustic free improvisation duo Monte Espina, which has collaborated with other musicians including Louise Fristensky, Liz Tonne, Sarah Ruth, Cut Shutters, Steve Jansen, Rebecca Novak, Derek Rogers, Robert Haultaine, Elaine Di Falco, Kevin Butler, Aaron Gonzalez, Matthew Frerck, Tom Carter, Locations, Michelle, Ray Henninger. Monte Espina’s first official release “y culebra” was published last year on Marginal Frequency, and received a wider visibility, some of it in the form of reviews on The Wire magazine and the Tone Shift site.

Since the beginning of KUZU LP FM 92.9, a Denton community radio station, he’s been a monthly guest on Sarah Ruth’s show Tiger D, and started his own every-other-Thursday two-hour show, Sonido Tumbarrancho, on August 2018.

He is curator for the Further Sounds/Further Jazz experimental music series at The Wild Detectives and has been organizing concerts in different spaces around Dallas. As a visual artist Montiel has been developing for some years a chance driven body of work, Stochastic Ethics.