THU., NOVEMBER 30, 2006
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The Sound of Exiled Chile
by Philip Sherburne
Chile's Desierto de Atacama, like all great deserts, is famous for its unearthliness: moonscape valleys, sulfuric geysers, vampiric chupacabras that suck the blood and brains of livestock (or so the locals say). Sightings of OVNIs, or UFOs, are common here; according to fellow passengers on a 1997 trip I took to the village of San Pedro de Atacama, our bus was treated to an eerie lightshow that could only have been extraterrestrial. (I was asleep; that's the last time I sleep on that route.)
On a historic night in 1994, though, the strobes over the sands came from human sources — even if they seemed no less otherworldly. That was the year that Atacama — the border city of Arica, to be precise — hosted its first rave. (Actually, lights were hardly the point; the rave coincided with a solar eclipse.) Thousands of partygoers from all over Chile danced to Derrick May and visiting European DJs — as well as to one visiting European DJ who just happened to be Chilean.
That musician, like many of his compatriots, was a child of expats who had fled General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1973, and grown up in Europe, where rave culture was thriving in the wake of the Berlin Wall's collapse. This DJ and his circle were catalyzed by the Atacama rave, and they began revisiting Chile or putting down new roots, planting the seeds of a local electronic-music community — but one with a twist. Unlike so many rave outposts around the world that model themselves on faraway originators, Chile proved a unique kind of node: it fed ideas back to Europe via its dual-passport-carrying ambassadors of electronic music.
That DJ was Ricardo Villalobos, and he and his colleagues have since become well known within dance-music circles; their recent work continues to redefine the shape of techno around the globe. But a look at their back catalogues, as well as the work of more marginal Chilean figures, helps fill in the story, offering a rare insight into Chilean techno's early years, adolescence and surprisingly broad influence.
Villalobos' Salvador, released this year, collects seven early tracks produced between 1998 and 2001 for the label Frisbee Tracks. (Bonus Chilean content: the artist is photographed sitting in the middle of a desert stretch of Ruta 5, the highway that slices the Andean nation throat to belly.) At the time, the future superstar DJ and former percussion student was living in Frankfurt and beginning to gig abroad; the album finds him navigating the space between no-nonsense Frankfurt techno, marked by machinic timbres and a hint of trance, and the syncopated rhythms he had studied in Cuba and Brazil. Nothing here is as convoluted as his work from the last couple of years, but you can hear hints of his current style in the dusky undulations of "Que Belle Epoque 2006."
After Villalobos, Luciano is Chile's best known techno representative; unlike many of his colleagues, he was actually born in Switzerland, relocating to Chile with his family in the '90s. Future Senses is his only record for Frankfurt's Klang/Ongaku/Playhouse labels, also an early home of Villalobos; while he has become known as one of techno's foremost minimalists, the six tracks here have far more in common with the melancholic, melodic sensibilities of early Autechre or Arovane, refracted through a particularly Latin (even Caribbean) sense of syncopation. (Are those steel drums in "Lilou Swan"?) Fast forward to Luciano's 2006 mix Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi. to see a portrait of the artist as the superstar he's become: 21 tracks deep, the DJ mix for Glasgow's Soma label is an incomparably kinetic blast of machine-shop percussion and woodshopped rhythmic refinement, each bar more precise than the one before.
Dandy Jack, aka Martin Schopf, is the little-known linchpin of the Chilean scene; it was at his grandmother's house that he, Villalobos and Luciano set up a studio in the mid '90s — in fact, the loss of that house reportedly forms the backstory to Villalobos' famous track "Easy Lee" — and it was on a trip with Schopf that Frankfurt's Uwe Schmidt decided to relocate to Chile. Schmidt, of course, is best known as Atom Heart and Señor Coconut, and today he lives in Santiago with his Chilean wife and daughters. (A number of Schmidt's Atom Heart recordings are available on eMusic, and the live B2 is particularly recommended; but it's as Coconut, of course, that Schmidt has best fused two overdetermined, even clichéd worlds — the "cold" electronics of Germany and the "hot" rhythms of South America — transcending kitsch and critique alike to come up with something artlessly entertaining. Yellow Fever, which brokers a truce between Perez Prado, Martin Denny and Schmidt's heroes Yellow Magic Orchestra, is particularly worth seeking out.)
While little of Schmidt's work as Dandy Jack is in eMusic's catalogue, aside from some late '90s ambient recordings (alongside Pete Namlook) for Fax, there are some gems from his project Sieg Über Die Sonne, his duo (since 1991!) with Tobias Freund, aka Pink Elln. Their 2005 album Root takes Kruder & Dorfmeister-styled downtempo as its starting point before launching into more bizarre orbits encompassing paranoid vocals, digital decay and white-knuckled dance routines. Schmidt's characteristic and outsized sense of humor shows through in the songs' idiosyncratic voicing; but despite their generous, even cartoonish, proportions, not a note's out of place. Sieg Über Die Sonne Live proves that this is one electronic act that's actually learned to remake itself on stage in real time; compare the album and live versions of cuts like "Gone" and "Charlotte De Gauille"/"Don't Stop Charlotte," and you'll get a sense for what makes their live show so fierce. While you're at it, don't miss Villalobos' mix of "Cleaning Windows" — the nine-minute percussive freakout doubles the time of the original to become a high-speed chase through a rabbit-hole lined with mirrors.
Schopf's sister Paula, long a resident of Berlin (and girlfriend of the proprietor of Karaoke Kalk) is one of the least known members of the Chilean expat diaspora, but she deserves more attention. Her album for Berlin's Monika label under the alias Chica and the Folder is an odd and endearing combination of roughly sampled drums and naive voices. While her work really needs the album format to express itself, try out "Der Wolf Und P." and "A Certain Track" to see if it's for you. (Dinky, another Chilean expat, updates "Dalenko" to fine effect for the Monika Force compilation, turning the original's punkish, short-attention-span theater of styles into an eerily harmonized meditation on the childlike joys of funk.)
Any true fan of Chilean music, of course, owes it to him- or herself to check out Violetta Parra, the folksinger who studied, propagated and reinvigorated the country's indigenous folk music in the '50s and '60s. Parra committed suicide in 1967, but she was an important figure in the Chilean Left. She helped to bring Salvador Allende, Chile's short-lived Socialist president, to power, and her work in reestablishing folkloric peñas bore fruit as an important source of resistance during Pinochet's regime.
Parra's Cantos de Chile, a simple blend of acoustic guitar and voice, foreshadows the resourcefulness of Chile's future minimalists, eking incredibly emotive fruit out of apparently barren ground. Fittingly, for a time Villalobos sampled Parra's songs in his live sets, editing her sparse, melancholic arrangements to accommodate minimal techno's insistent bass drum — and letting silence tell the rest of his story. Like the solar eclipse that hung over that 1994 rave where he first took the Chilean stage, it's a story of full circles cut tragically, tantalizingly short.
On a historic night in 1994, though, the strobes over the sands came from human sources — even if they seemed no less otherworldly. That was the year that Atacama — the border city of Arica, to be precise — hosted its first rave. (Actually, lights were hardly the point; the rave coincided with a solar eclipse.) Thousands of partygoers from all over Chile danced to Derrick May and visiting European DJs — as well as to one visiting European DJ who just happened to be Chilean.
That musician, like many of his compatriots, was a child of expats who had fled General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1973, and grown up in Europe, where rave culture was thriving in the wake of the Berlin Wall's collapse. This DJ and his circle were catalyzed by the Atacama rave, and they began revisiting Chile or putting down new roots, planting the seeds of a local electronic-music community — but one with a twist. Unlike so many rave outposts around the world that model themselves on faraway originators, Chile proved a unique kind of node: it fed ideas back to Europe via its dual-passport-carrying ambassadors of electronic music.
That DJ was Ricardo Villalobos, and he and his colleagues have since become well known within dance-music circles; their recent work continues to redefine the shape of techno around the globe. But a look at their back catalogues, as well as the work of more marginal Chilean figures, helps fill in the story, offering a rare insight into Chilean techno's early years, adolescence and surprisingly broad influence.
Villalobos' Salvador, released this year, collects seven early tracks produced between 1998 and 2001 for the label Frisbee Tracks. (Bonus Chilean content: the artist is photographed sitting in the middle of a desert stretch of Ruta 5, the highway that slices the Andean nation throat to belly.) At the time, the future superstar DJ and former percussion student was living in Frankfurt and beginning to gig abroad; the album finds him navigating the space between no-nonsense Frankfurt techno, marked by machinic timbres and a hint of trance, and the syncopated rhythms he had studied in Cuba and Brazil. Nothing here is as convoluted as his work from the last couple of years, but you can hear hints of his current style in the dusky undulations of "Que Belle Epoque 2006."
After Villalobos, Luciano is Chile's best known techno representative; unlike many of his colleagues, he was actually born in Switzerland, relocating to Chile with his family in the '90s. Future Senses is his only record for Frankfurt's Klang/Ongaku/Playhouse labels, also an early home of Villalobos; while he has become known as one of techno's foremost minimalists, the six tracks here have far more in common with the melancholic, melodic sensibilities of early Autechre or Arovane, refracted through a particularly Latin (even Caribbean) sense of syncopation. (Are those steel drums in "Lilou Swan"?) Fast forward to Luciano's 2006 mix Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi. to see a portrait of the artist as the superstar he's become: 21 tracks deep, the DJ mix for Glasgow's Soma label is an incomparably kinetic blast of machine-shop percussion and woodshopped rhythmic refinement, each bar more precise than the one before.
Dandy Jack, aka Martin Schopf, is the little-known linchpin of the Chilean scene; it was at his grandmother's house that he, Villalobos and Luciano set up a studio in the mid '90s — in fact, the loss of that house reportedly forms the backstory to Villalobos' famous track "Easy Lee" — and it was on a trip with Schopf that Frankfurt's Uwe Schmidt decided to relocate to Chile. Schmidt, of course, is best known as Atom Heart and Señor Coconut, and today he lives in Santiago with his Chilean wife and daughters. (A number of Schmidt's Atom Heart recordings are available on eMusic, and the live B2 is particularly recommended; but it's as Coconut, of course, that Schmidt has best fused two overdetermined, even clichéd worlds — the "cold" electronics of Germany and the "hot" rhythms of South America — transcending kitsch and critique alike to come up with something artlessly entertaining. Yellow Fever, which brokers a truce between Perez Prado, Martin Denny and Schmidt's heroes Yellow Magic Orchestra, is particularly worth seeking out.)
While little of Schmidt's work as Dandy Jack is in eMusic's catalogue, aside from some late '90s ambient recordings (alongside Pete Namlook) for Fax, there are some gems from his project Sieg Über Die Sonne, his duo (since 1991!) with Tobias Freund, aka Pink Elln. Their 2005 album Root takes Kruder & Dorfmeister-styled downtempo as its starting point before launching into more bizarre orbits encompassing paranoid vocals, digital decay and white-knuckled dance routines. Schmidt's characteristic and outsized sense of humor shows through in the songs' idiosyncratic voicing; but despite their generous, even cartoonish, proportions, not a note's out of place. Sieg Über Die Sonne Live proves that this is one electronic act that's actually learned to remake itself on stage in real time; compare the album and live versions of cuts like "Gone" and "Charlotte De Gauille"/"Don't Stop Charlotte," and you'll get a sense for what makes their live show so fierce. While you're at it, don't miss Villalobos' mix of "Cleaning Windows" — the nine-minute percussive freakout doubles the time of the original to become a high-speed chase through a rabbit-hole lined with mirrors.
Schopf's sister Paula, long a resident of Berlin (and girlfriend of the proprietor of Karaoke Kalk) is one of the least known members of the Chilean expat diaspora, but she deserves more attention. Her album for Berlin's Monika label under the alias Chica and the Folder is an odd and endearing combination of roughly sampled drums and naive voices. While her work really needs the album format to express itself, try out "Der Wolf Und P." and "A Certain Track" to see if it's for you. (Dinky, another Chilean expat, updates "Dalenko" to fine effect for the Monika Force compilation, turning the original's punkish, short-attention-span theater of styles into an eerily harmonized meditation on the childlike joys of funk.)
Any true fan of Chilean music, of course, owes it to him- or herself to check out Violetta Parra, the folksinger who studied, propagated and reinvigorated the country's indigenous folk music in the '50s and '60s. Parra committed suicide in 1967, but she was an important figure in the Chilean Left. She helped to bring Salvador Allende, Chile's short-lived Socialist president, to power, and her work in reestablishing folkloric peñas bore fruit as an important source of resistance during Pinochet's regime.
Parra's Cantos de Chile, a simple blend of acoustic guitar and voice, foreshadows the resourcefulness of Chile's future minimalists, eking incredibly emotive fruit out of apparently barren ground. Fittingly, for a time Villalobos sampled Parra's songs in his live sets, editing her sparse, melancholic arrangements to accommodate minimal techno's insistent bass drum — and letting silence tell the rest of his story. Like the solar eclipse that hung over that 1994 rave where he first took the Chilean stage, it's a story of full circles cut tragically, tantalizingly short.
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