January 23, 2008

El Guincho

By Sophie in El Guincho | 4 comments

pablo

Mistletone is proud to announce the return of Barcelona’s foremost exponent of ecstatic tropical rave, El Guincho.

It’s been an incredible year for El Guincho’s Pablo Díaz-Reixa. After releasing his debut album Alegranza in Spain on his own label, then in Australia on Mistletone, he was signed worldwide to XL and has been touring the world, turning audiences on to his clattering dance beats, sing-along Spanish vocals and sun-drenched, sampladelic melodies.

Having wowed Australian audiences with his deliriously fun and joyful live performances with Architecture in Helsinki last May, this time Pablo Díaz-Reixa will be bringing percussionist Aleix Clavera to make El Guincho live show twice as hectic!

Catch El Guincho’s headline shows in Sydney and Melbourne, and at the Laneway Festival around Australia this summer. It’ll be an intoxicating, bacchanalian, tropicalia party you’ll never want to end….

EL GUINCHO AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2009

Friday, 30 January SYDNEY HEADLINE SHOW @ Oxford Arts Factory
El Guincho w/ extra special guest Mountains In The Sky. Tickets $27+BF on sale Friday 21 November from Moshtix.

Saturday, 31 January - BRISBANE LANEWAY

Sunday, 1 February - MELBOURNE LANEWAY

Thursday, 5 February MELBOURNE HEADLINE SHOW @ The Corner
El Guincho w/ extra special guest Qua. Tickets $27+BF on sale Friday 21 November from The Corner

Friday, 6 February - PERTH LANEWAY

Saturday, 7 February - ADELAIDE LANEWAY

Sunday, 8 February 2009 - SYDNEY LANEWAY


El Guincho on Myspace   MP3: Palmitos Park   MP3: El Guincho remix of Architecture In Helsinki’s Like It Or Not 

Video: Palmitos Park   

  pabloEl Guincho’s mind expanding debut album Alegranza was given its first release outside Spain by Mistletone in March 2008 and on XL in the UK and USA in October 2008. Mistletone is proud to present the return of El Guincho on his second Australian tour in 2009.

“Mind-boggling Afro, Calypso and Tropicalia-flavoured debut… pitching percussion and tumbling rhythm against a collage of tropical psyche-funk samples, uplifting melodies and pulsing vocal chants. It’s club music with an organic and ethnographic twist, as potently danceable and accessible as it is proudly locative.” - THE AGE

El Guincho is Pablo Díaz-Reixa, born in the Canary Islands and now based in Barcelona. Pablo went to music school as a kid but then left at the age of 14 to become a soccer or tennis star. Fortunately, he failed at both!

After some nomadic experiencies around Europe, he arrived in Barcelona at age twenty, started a hip hop project called Los Feriantes, played drums in the freestyle jam band Dead Man on Campus and finally formed Coconot with his cousin on guitar.

As Coconot he released “Novo Tropicalismo Errado” in February 2006 as a result of two years of non-stop listening to Tropicália and Kraut-Rock records. After a year of touring with the band, he came up with the idea of El Guincho and recorded Alegranza to much acclaim of the media and the fans.

Alegranza is a mix of afro-beat percussion, calypso harmonies, psych tropicália, world music samplers, doo wop, trance repetition, underwater pop, steel drums and island feeling plus club oriented song structures, uptempo beats and exotica production. It was released in the last days of December 2007, went out of print in Spain in less than a month and topped the lists of the most important Spanish music magazines. His popularity is rising to heady heights all around the world with a cult status thanks to constant blog posts and word of mouth.

pablo

From The Age newspaper:
Canary Islands mining
El Guincho sidesteps debate by channelling the sounds of his youth, writes Dan Rule.IT’S as if the indie kids finally gave dad’s long-neglected copy of Graceland a spin or three. The past 18 months have seen African music emerge as the indie coterie’s reference point of choice, resulting in a heady brew of fantastically lively records, critical acclaim and equally boisterous accusations of cultural appropriation.

But with his mind-boggling Afro, Calypso and Tropicalia-flavoured debut Alegranza!, Barcelona artist Pablo Diaz-Reixa or “El Guincho” has conveniently sidestepped much of the debate.

It’s with good reason. Born and raised in the Canary Islands, a Spanish colony off the coast of north-west Africa, the affable 24-year-old’s frenetic, multi-accented take on dance music isn’t some exotic flight of fancy. The record is a traversal of his roots.

“I don’t think many people realise this but 30% or 40% of the record is made with beats from the Canary Islands,” he says in his sticky Spanish accent. “People might call it Afrobeat or whatever but the vibe of this record is definitely from the Canary Islands.”As he goes on to explain, Canary Islands’ music spans three continents, each of which finds a place on Alegranza!
“The rhythm is really African, like this three-bar-four tribal thing, which comes directly from the coast of Africa,” he says. “But the harmonies come from South America and Spain and have this guitar, which is just a really Spanish thing.”
Yet, growing up in the sub-tropical climes of the North Atlantic archipelago, local musical fare was far from the front of mind. Despite classical training, courtesy of his grandmother, Diaz-Reixa’s interests turned towards sports. As an early teen he quit music with ambitions to become a tennis and soccer star.“When you’re like 12 or 13 or something, you just want to impress the girls and have fun, you know?” he says. “Playing soccer or tennis or water sports seemed like a much better idea.” But it wouldn’t last.At 18 he left the Canary Islands to travel through Europe, settling in Barcelona in 2003 where he returned to music and began exploring hip-hop and Detroit techno. It was something of a creative reawakening for the young musician. After starting a hip-hop group, he moved on to playing drums in a jam band.Eventually, he hooked up with a cousin to form Tropicalia-intoned kraut-rock outfit Coconut, applying his classical percussion training to guitar melodies, samples and otherwise electronically produced tracks.

It was a watershed.

Diaz-Reixa began mining the various local music of Hawaii, Madagascar, and Trinidad and Tobago, which led him to the sounds of his homeland. Suffice to say, he felt an instant connection and El Guincho was the result.

“It’s funny, I used to really hate Canary Islands music as a kid. To me, it was like old man’s folk music, you know, old guys with huge beards playing guitars and percussion and whatever,” he giggles.

“It’s funny how living in a different city and travelling to all these different places can open your mind to your own home.”

Alegranza! echoes with such sentiments, pitching percussion and tumbling rhythm against a collage of tropical psyche-funk samples, uplifting melodies and pulsing vocal chants. It’s club music with an organic and ethnographic twist, as potently danceable and accessible as it is proudly locative.

But he says it’s the El Guincho show that we should look out for.

“You know, I’d never really seen a video of myself until my friend filmed me at South by Southwest this year,” he says.

“To tell you the truth, it was just really freaky. It’s like I play the sampler and the keyboard with my left hand and then with my right hand the floor tom and a piece of wood. Then I have all these triggers on everything, so all the electronic and the acoustic stuff gets mixed.

“Oh, then I sing, too,” he chuckles. “It all makes me look kind of weird, you know. It’s like, ‘Wow!’ “

From Beat magazine:
el guincho

El Guincho

by Chris Girdler

If you’re enticed by the idea of an ‘amazonic rave’, than look no further than Pablo Díaz-Reixa and his trusty block of wood. World music has recently been cropping up as a key influence in a wide range of independent music, from MIA to The Ruby Suns, but never has the genre been embraced, deconstructed and delivered with such fervour as it has with the twisted tropicalia of the El Guincho album.
Alegranza (translates as ‘joy’) ticked the fancy of Pitchfork and a wide array of music blogs, and now has its first release outside of Spain through Mistletone Records. Pablo was born in the Canary Islands, but he now calls Barcelona home.
“I shifted from the Canary Islands, because I realised that life there wasn’t very exciting in terms of music,” says Díaz-Reixa. “I wanted a change in my life. I was 19, looking for some excitement. I really feel at home here in Barcelona now.”
Although he didn’t collaborate or join a band until he settled in Barcelona, music has always been at the forefront of Pablo’s life, despite aspirations to become a sports star in his early teens. “My grandmother is a music teacher, I studied percussion and harmony at school. I was into music but I hadn’t played in a band until I moved to Barcelona. I was just playing around with keyboards and samplers in my bedroom. The main thing I was excited about was hip hop. I really wanted to study musicology and my main idea was to compare island music from around the world. I started buying records and finding stuff on the internet.”
Once in Barcelona, Pablo became active on the music scene, from forming the hip hop project Los Feriantes to drumming in freestyle band Dead Man on Campus, to Coconut, with his cousin on guitar. He came up with the concept of El Guincho while on tour with Coconut. I asked Pablo how these different genres influenced and led to the distinctive El Guincho sound.
“Looking at my biography, it looks like I went from hip hop to a jam band to Coconut to this, but El Guincho has been going for all my life. It started in my bedroom when I was a teenager, and sometimes I use the El Guincho alias, sometimes I use other aliases. So it was just something really natural for me and the final album came together in hardly any time at all.”
Where do you source all the elements that make up one of your songs? And where do you go from there? “Mostly they’re made up from old vinyl and cassettes I picked up in different cities. I found the sounds were really diverse and often almost accidental. Different sounds from all around the world, like island music, which was a lot of what I sampled. Piecing it together was basically intuition, taking the samples and layering them, at first with the drum parts, which I did in the studio over two days.”When you first listen to the album, the songs sound deceptively simple. But there’s a lot going on in there. I asked if he takes a sample and work from there, or if he has a general idea of the track before integrating samples and loops? “I never start with a loop. You owe a lot to that first loop and have to build everything from that, which just isn’t interesting for me. So I like to start with really little pieces of stuff and using a drum machine, really try to think about the rhythm. I’ll try to build the loop after that.”There have been comparisons of Alegranzo! to the Person Pitch album by Panda Bear. Although the Panda Bear album is more of an insular experience than the unremitting ‘party time’ feel of Alegranzo!, they do share similarities, such as their integration of world music and the innovative sense of rhythm used to piece the samples together and subtly create layers of sound. “I was really interested in the BBC sessions that Animal Collective did, where they were playing around with samples of tornadoes. When the Panda Bear album came out, I was like ‘Wow, this is really great’, but I never thought people would compare the two albums. It felt weird to me, but I’m honoured because they’re a great band.”El Guincho is now bringing his live show to Australia for the first time. As well as some solo shows, he is providing support for Architecture in Helsinki – he also recently remixed their song Like It Or Not. The wildly genre-bending music of El Guincho is likely to appeal to a wide range of music-lovers: indie kids, bat-lovers enticed by trance-like repetitive loops and people who just want to get down. As Dan Deacon’s recent shows proved, you don’t need accompanying musicians, distractions or pyrotechnics to put on a solo show. Prepare yourself for a one-man party.“For the live show, in my left hand I play the sampler like a keyboard and deconstruct all the loops, and in my right hand I play all the percussion, and then I sing. I don’t often stop between songs so it’s almost set up like a DJ set, quite dance-oriented. It’s usually like a party, almost quite tribal. For me this is primarily a pop album, but it’s also a dance album.”
 
 
 

Three Thousand review:

Recent outbreaks of Internet-slaves playing bongos, all hyphy “like Fela” reeks of moneyed putrefaction - at best reminding of C. Thomas Howell’s character in Soul Man, who overdoses on tanning pills in an effort to ‘get down’ with his college basketball team. It’s imperative Alegranza - the debut record from Barcelona’s Pablo Diaz-Reix, aka El Guincho -is not confused with this vapid trend. Newly released in Australia by Mistletone, it’s a genuinely breezy party record that transcends so many re-upped, hackneyed remakes of Tropicalia and Afro-beat’s rhythmic glee.

Every track is a basket of cheers packed with steel drums, sunny instrumental samples and Pablo’s ecstatic chanting in Spanish. Openers ‘Palmitos Park’ and ‘Antillas’ have the jungle-fun feel of The Lion King minus the naff (miraculously), and when, in ‘Fata Morgana’ a rare sample in English declares, “All of the joy of young people in love is conveyed in this delightful and simple melody”, it’s entirely justified. The issue isn’t authenticity - all of Alegranza is sampled anyway - it’s integrity and unforced fun, and El Guincho has it as much as Deelite did, or Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

By Mark Gomes

 

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4 Comment(s)

  1. Phil | Jan 23, 2008 | Reply

    Waaaw! This guy is better than Panda Bear! This guy is going to do something big this year, congrats for this release. I love “alegranza”

    xxooxoo

  2. Miguel | Feb 1, 2008 | Reply

    No way…
    Panda Bear is king!! El Guincho is alright, but it kinda reminds me too much of Panda Bear. Not a rip off, but close.

  3. ac | Feb 2, 2008 | Reply

    El Guincho fucking rules!

  4. brendan | Mar 2, 2008 | Reply

    which stores can i get this record from in melb?

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