It stocked labels such as ECM, Hyperion and Chandos, and cared more about what a record contained than how well it sold. I helped him choose what to bring in, going through printed distributor catalogs by hand, long before any of it was a click away.

In 2003 I opened my own shop, Sibelius, to carry that idea forward. A year later, Métrica began as a free magazine — recommending records, books and films with the enthusiasm you'd use to tip off a friend.

Over time, those recommendations became objects: screen-printed tees, art prints and notebooks. Later they became concerts, playlists, interviews and other editorial projects. The format changed, but the instinct stayed the same — find something worth keeping and give it a form you can hold onto.

Métrica doesn't make vintage-inspired graphics.

Each design begins with an original document, artwork or printed source: a handwritten score, a cyanotype, a geometric proof, a cut-paper poem. The source is researched, verified and reproduced with its history intact.

Sibelius closed more than a decade ago, as many record shops did, but the work continued. Today I also run Sonora, a music-discovery platform organized by record label — more than 600 labels and no recommendation algorithm. The tees and prints come out of that same world, not from a trend forecast.

Everything is selected and developed here in Mar del Plata, then printed in small batches in the United States — the tees on AS Colour midweight combed cotton. I choose the garments, the paper and the printing methods, and I write the short museum-style note that accompanies each design, because the context is half the point.

One of the oldest pieces in the first collection came to me by accident. In the summer of 2024, I photographed a paper valentine at the New York Public Library and forgot the picture existed. It was The Monitory Lizard, cut by hand around 1823 by the poet Elizabeth Cobbold. Today it is one of the shirts — faithfully reproduced from the original cut-paper work.

If something is wrong with your order, you're not writing to a call center — you're writing to me.
vicente@metrica.art

— Vicente Grondona

There is no support desk. Write to me — about a size, an order that went wrong, a document you think belongs in the archive, or the record that changed your life.