WED., MAY 27, 2009
Post Spotlight to FacebookIn This Feature
Magazine Archives:
Zizek and Digital Cumbia
by Richard Gehr
Every Thursday night at the Voodoo Motel in Buenos Aires's styling Palermo neighborhood, resident DJs Villa Diamante, Nim and El G throw a weekly party known as Zizek. Named after the insanely brilliant, or perhaps just brilliantly insane, Slovenian philosopher-psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek (the connection has something to do with his marriage to an Argentine model), their weekly fiesta focuses on the cutting edge of digital cumbia along with other tropical and urban delights. Launched in 2006, the party's success begat an equally intrepid label, ZZK Records. Beginning with ZZK Sound Vol. 1: Cumbia Digital, the label provides a transmission tower for a canny international cabal of electrocumbia experimentalists including Fauna, El Hijo de la Cumbia, Douster, and El Remolón among others.
Cumbia, which originated as a Colombian folk dance and evolved into the most popular dance music south of the U.S. border, relies on a steady 2/4 beat propelled by an irresistibly loping bass line. (Colombia's greatest traditional cumbia stars include accordion masters Lisandro Meza and Alfredo Gutierrez and great bands such as La Sonora Dinamita.) Beginning in the '60s, cumbia began to infect other regional styles while soaking up its own international influences, especially salsa. Selena's 1981 hit, "Technocumbia," marked the increasing popularity of cheesy synthesizers and drum machines in the cumbia scene, particularly in Peru, where teknocumbia gradually supplanted the jungle cumbia style called chicha (as heard on the classic Roots of Chicha compilation).
In Argentina, the Zizek scene is an oasis of relatively upscale cumbia hijinks amid a much more popular variation on the style known as cumbia villera (bee-SHARE-uh), meaning "shantytown" cumbia. Cumbia villera's godfather is Pablo Lescando, who fronts the band Damas Gratis (Ladies Free). Lescando resuscitated moribund Argentina cumbia during the '90s with a slashing knife fight of a keyboard sound and gangsta lyrics celebrating sex, drugs, and crime. You may even have caught Lescando — on keytar! — as part of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs 2009 comeback tour.
I was just as psyched to catch a Zizek skeleton crew of Fauna, Douster and El G at Manhattan's Santos Party House during the brand's most recent tour of North America. I was surprised to learn that El G was the alias of Texas expatriate and Zizek co-founder Grant Dull, who relocated to Buenos Aires in order to revel in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and the nuevo tangos of Astor Piazzolla. The night began with a crowd-pleasing, and often thrilling, collage of tunes from the ZZK files such as El Trip Selector's "Coombia del Piano Triste," with its distressed merry-go-round groove, and El Hijo de la Cumbia's echo-y street party, "La Mara Tomasa." El Hijo de la Cumbia (The Son of Cumbia, AKA Emiliano Gómez) is a young Argentinean who learned his trade in Mexico, and his Freestyle de Ritmos is a remarkably rootsy blend of vintage cumbia with dub and hip-hop.
El G then slapped on an animal mask and transformed himself into the selector for neon-panchoed emcees Catar_sys and Color Kit (Federico Rodríguez and Cristian Del Negro, respectively) — AKA Fauna. Hailing from the Andean foothills of Mendoza, Argentina, Fauna blends the crazy synthesizer sounds of cumbia villera with trippy jungle cumbia and forked-tongue mind-meld raps. Their debut album, La Manita de Fauna (The Little Hand of Fauna), seems to have one foot in the city and the other in the rural outback, where legendary creatures such as "El Zombie" and "Los Piratas del Zanjón" go about their shady business. Following Fauna was Douster, a young French fellow from Lyon, who quickly shifted the equation back to a more international mix of house, funk, and techno – as heard on his delightfully profane "For Weirdos Only/Freak Mode" EP and "This Shit" single — with a tropical tinge.
Ultimately, Zizek's only doing what a generation of IDM producers did before them — transforming raw street sounds into weirder and more cerebral headphones and club music without rejecting, and in fact even celebrating, their unselfconscious essence. As demonstrated by the several excellent mixtapes you can find on their website, the Zizek crew patches cumbia's folkloric, salsafied, and electronically altered strands into a time capsule it then launches into the cosmos. Where it will land is anybody's guess, but whoever finds it is going to have a ball.
Cumbia, which originated as a Colombian folk dance and evolved into the most popular dance music south of the U.S. border, relies on a steady 2/4 beat propelled by an irresistibly loping bass line. (Colombia's greatest traditional cumbia stars include accordion masters Lisandro Meza and Alfredo Gutierrez and great bands such as La Sonora Dinamita.) Beginning in the '60s, cumbia began to infect other regional styles while soaking up its own international influences, especially salsa. Selena's 1981 hit, "Technocumbia," marked the increasing popularity of cheesy synthesizers and drum machines in the cumbia scene, particularly in Peru, where teknocumbia gradually supplanted the jungle cumbia style called chicha (as heard on the classic Roots of Chicha compilation).
In Argentina, the Zizek scene is an oasis of relatively upscale cumbia hijinks amid a much more popular variation on the style known as cumbia villera (bee-SHARE-uh), meaning "shantytown" cumbia. Cumbia villera's godfather is Pablo Lescando, who fronts the band Damas Gratis (Ladies Free). Lescando resuscitated moribund Argentina cumbia during the '90s with a slashing knife fight of a keyboard sound and gangsta lyrics celebrating sex, drugs, and crime. You may even have caught Lescando — on keytar! — as part of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs 2009 comeback tour.
I was just as psyched to catch a Zizek skeleton crew of Fauna, Douster and El G at Manhattan's Santos Party House during the brand's most recent tour of North America. I was surprised to learn that El G was the alias of Texas expatriate and Zizek co-founder Grant Dull, who relocated to Buenos Aires in order to revel in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and the nuevo tangos of Astor Piazzolla. The night began with a crowd-pleasing, and often thrilling, collage of tunes from the ZZK files such as El Trip Selector's "Coombia del Piano Triste," with its distressed merry-go-round groove, and El Hijo de la Cumbia's echo-y street party, "La Mara Tomasa." El Hijo de la Cumbia (The Son of Cumbia, AKA Emiliano Gómez) is a young Argentinean who learned his trade in Mexico, and his Freestyle de Ritmos is a remarkably rootsy blend of vintage cumbia with dub and hip-hop.
El G then slapped on an animal mask and transformed himself into the selector for neon-panchoed emcees Catar_sys and Color Kit (Federico Rodríguez and Cristian Del Negro, respectively) — AKA Fauna. Hailing from the Andean foothills of Mendoza, Argentina, Fauna blends the crazy synthesizer sounds of cumbia villera with trippy jungle cumbia and forked-tongue mind-meld raps. Their debut album, La Manita de Fauna (The Little Hand of Fauna), seems to have one foot in the city and the other in the rural outback, where legendary creatures such as "El Zombie" and "Los Piratas del Zanjón" go about their shady business. Following Fauna was Douster, a young French fellow from Lyon, who quickly shifted the equation back to a more international mix of house, funk, and techno – as heard on his delightfully profane "For Weirdos Only/Freak Mode" EP and "This Shit" single — with a tropical tinge.
Ultimately, Zizek's only doing what a generation of IDM producers did before them — transforming raw street sounds into weirder and more cerebral headphones and club music without rejecting, and in fact even celebrating, their unselfconscious essence. As demonstrated by the several excellent mixtapes you can find on their website, the Zizek crew patches cumbia's folkloric, salsafied, and electronically altered strands into a time capsule it then launches into the cosmos. Where it will land is anybody's guess, but whoever finds it is going to have a ball.
© 1992 - 2010 All Media Guide, LLC