Give em El
Spanish party starter El Guincho is coming to town. Andrew P Street thusly gets his groove on
El Guincho hails from Tropicalia climes
"Barcelona" may not be your immediate response to the question: "From which city has the best Tropicalia record of recent years emerged?" - but that'd only be because you hadn't heard Alegranza by El Guincho. It's an intoxicating mix of South American textures, Afrobeat rhythms and dub-influenced mixing, at times sounding like the surf-bum offspring of The Avalanches and Beck, at others like the background music for the grooviest cigarette advertisement the 70s could offer. The man who is El Guincho - Pablo Díaz-Reixa - is bringing his Roland 404 and his dancing shoes out to Australia for the first time this week, celebrating the fact that our country is the first place to release Alegranza outside of Spain.
"Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah! That's true!" he exclaims. "I think [local indie label] Mistletone contacted us around January, so they were the first one to reach out. I don't remember how they found out [about the record] - it was through MySpace, maybe? They seemed like pretty cool guys."
This uncomplicated attitude also flowed into the arrangements for El Guincho's Australian visit. "Again, I don't know how they listened to my stuff, but Ash [Miles] and Sophie [Best, the owners of Mistletone] were like ‘Hey! Architecture in Helsinki want you to go with them on tour, do you want to come?' and I said ‘Yes, sir!' I've never been to Australia, so that was very exciting."
Thanks to technology, it's a remarkably easy job for Díaz-Reixa to tour. Since Alegranza is constructed mainly of samples, it sounds like he could more or less fit his entire touring kit in a single suitcase.
"When I tour I bring my sampler, a floor tom and a piece of wood," he declares. "With my left hand I play my sampler, and with my right hand I play the percussion: the floor tom and the piece of wood. That's my set!"
Surprisingly, given how long it takes most artists to create sample-constructed music (as the wait for the second Avalanches album slouches into its second decade), Díaz-Reixa declares that he writes very quickly, putting it down to the fact that he works to a very well-defined template. "I was thinking of this idea for years, of taking music from different islands around the world and trying to fit them together with the same kind of sound," he explains, "because most of these albums are written in major scales, so it's pretty easy, you know?
So, trying to fit some Trinidad and Tobago beat with some Cuban doo-wop sample, like to begin it sounded weird, but when I was trying to mix it, it worked in a way that sounded nice to me. So I write really fast, because I'd had the idea before."
El Guincho performs at the Supper Club at Will & Toby's on Sat 10 May and supports Architecture In Helsinki at the Metro on Sun 11 May