El Guincho on Myspace
MP3: Palmitos Park
MP3: El Guincho remix of Architecture In Helsinki’s Like It Or Not
Video: Kalise
El Guincho’s mind expanding debut album Alegranza is out now in Australia & New Zealand on Mistletone and is soon to be released on XL in the UK and USA.
“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
“The impressive and probably unwittingly fashionable source material– Afrobeat, dub, Tropicália, and early rock’n'roll– and the irresistibility of these songs can only briefly obscure the fact that no one else is really making music quite like this… This is music for children, in the best sense — wide-eyed and excitedly open to the whole spectrum of possibilities out there in the world”
- PITCHFORK (8.3 out of 10)
“Amid the carousel chimes, tin-pan Tropicália and corroded dub, Alegranza leaps manically from one beaming influence to another, constantly shifting guises, knitting a comfortable coastal paradise. Reminiscent of Panda Bear’s pursuits on the Portuguese coast with Person Pitch, Pablo Díaz-Reixa’s debut outing was recorded off the lapping Catalunyan shores and manages to provide the same intoxicating carnival-esque procession for all to marvel at.”
- DROWNED IN SOUND (8 out of 10)
“The work of one talented Pablo Díaz-Reixa, Alegranza (which translates as ‘Joy’), is an amalgam of musical influences ranging from Benga (Kenyan traditional music) to Bhangra (Indian folk), Brazilian and Indie sounds. At once familiar and completely new, this layered record is a timeless piece of pop.”
-3RRR ALBUM OF WEEK
“Alegranza is a love-in of space-age proportions from this Spanish newbie, serving up a psychedelic pot of Afrobeat, dub, Tropicalia, rhythm ‘n blues and more”
- 2SER FEATURE CD
ABOUT EL GUINCHO
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.
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. Mistletone Records has given Alegranza its first release outside Spain.
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.
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
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.”From Inpress:
From Three D World:
El Guincho - Spanish Harmony
| Written by Jane Stabler |
| Friday, 02 May 2008 |
 Lots of things trigger thoughts of holidays; the sun, piña coladas, the smell of coconut oil…and the sounds of El Guincho.Spanish artist El Guincho has created a sound that is best described as pop, tropical and club – essentially a medley of happy harmonies and clattering loops that sound like little else you are likely to have encountered in auditory escapades. So if you are yet to familiarise yourself with his musical genius, the best way to do so is with a lathering of fake tan and a drink you can put an umbrella in.El Guincho himself admits that his tropical disco sound is fairly unusual when compared with other dance styles, although he says he didn’t deliberately set out to make music that put him in a league, and a genre, all of his own.“I was writing this album in my bedroom,” he explains, “and I came up with the sampler and from YouTube and I was playing vinyl so it was random. It was naïve, I didn’t really have any plan, I was in my bedroom! I don’t know [how to describe my music]. Maybe dance music [is the term] they relate to, but I don’t know, it’s like pop music.”However you want to describe it, a lot of people are finding El Guincho’s infectious musical style hits the right chords. One of the key attributes that sets this Spanish musician’s sound apart from so many other dance offerings is his ability to successfully blend a lot of musical styles. Having dreamed of working with music his whole life, it makes sense that he has learned how to combine the styles that he loves to create his own blend of music.“My dream was to study musicology, so I was really into finding good music and understanding it,” he explains. “I was interested in the music of the islands of the world, like Cuba, and I tried to select music from different islands of the world and I found that most of them, when I happened to mix it, the sound worked really well together, so it gave me that idea, the rhythm sounds so different but the harmony carries the vibe.”The island theme is certainly inescapable when you tune into El Guincho’s tracks, and as a result his sound is often like the auditory equivalent of being on a tropical island holiday. Although he does take a lot of influence from tropical sounds, El Guincho still insists that he’s just creating the music that he likes and there’s no real reason behind it other than that.
“When people say your music sounds like this or that, I don’t really know,” he considers. “There’s some really dark songs because of the lyrics, but the major scales makes people think of happy music and I’m really happy that people get good feelings from it when they listen to my music, but it wasn’t my main goal because I hadn’t any main goal.” |
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
From Vice magazine:
Pitchfork review (8.3 out of 10):
“The impressive and probably unwittingly fashionable source material– Afrobeat, dub, Tropicália, and early rock’n'roll– and the irresistibility of these songs can only briefly obscure the fact that no one else is really making music quite like this… This is music for children, in the best sense — wide-eyed and excitedly open to the whole spectrum of possibilities out there in the world”
Drowned In Sound review (8 out of 10):
“Amid the carousel chimes, tin-pan Tropicália and corroded dub, Alegranza leaps manically from one beaming influence to another, constantly shifting guises, knitting a comfortable coastal paradise. Reminiscent of Panda Bear’s pursuits on the Portuguese coast with Person Pitch, Pablo Díaz-Reixa’s debut outing was recorded off the lapping Catalunyan shores and manages to provide the same intoxicating carnival-esque procession for all to marvel at.”
3RRR Album Of The Week:
“The work of one talented Pablo Díaz-Reixa, Alegranza (which translates as ‘Joy’), is an amalgam of musical influences ranging from Benga (Kenyan traditional music) to Bhangra (Indian folk), Brazilian and Indie sounds. At once familiar and completely new, this layered record is a timeless piece of pop.”
The Vine review:
In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity – and the 2000 film version of the same – the terminally crotchety Rob Gordon (John Cusack in the film) has a despised neighbour in his flat. The much-hated Ian wears his hair long and, what’s worse, listens to loads of world music. This odd resentment captured something of the grungy times.
And yet, and yet – not ten years later, large swathes of the alternative-leaning music scene are in love with the polyglot M.I.A., enamoured by Brazilians CSS and Bonde de Role, sipping tea to the Tropicalia collection, doing the dishes to the African blues and rock of Tinariwen and Konono No 1, reading McSweeneys to Diplo and dancing to Filastine and DJ Rupture. “World music,” a condescending term at the best of times, is less of a millstone these days.
El Guincho’s Alegranza! is a veritable encapsulation of all this, a whirlwind tour of global sounds, cut-pasted-and-spliced into a smiling set of percussive concoctions. It’s equal parts of so many things, it sounds quite like nothing else – other than perhaps the spirit of the very-best-intentioned globalisation. Afro-beat. Calypso. Trance. Blues. Rock. Dance. Laughter. Call it the result of spending your formative years on the Canary Islands in Spain, but El Guincho (aka Pablo Diaz-Reixa) carries joy and celebration at its heart. Vocal rounds layer and tag each other, ascending and descending spiral staircases. Drums pulse and throb with an unending sense of nocturnal release. It’s like listening to the most tasteful Haiwaiian shirt you’ve ever seen. It’s like putting on board shorts and boarding a mystery flight. It’s like staring at a rack of postcards. It’s like building a sandcastle for the first time. It’s like smelling coconut oil and tucking cocktail umbrellas behind your ears.
Ben Gook
Spark Online review:
Alegranza is an album remarkable in its ability to simultaneously invite and dismiss comparison. El Guincho is Pablo Diaz-Reixa and he’s managed to sample half a planet worth of music without it coalescing into a lazy homogeneity. His beats oscillate with wild abandon and yet the album feels tightly sprung, like a jack-in-the-box that’s been teasingly wound up. Born in the Canary Islands and now based in Barcelona, El Guincho kicks off Alegranza with a track that slams doowop honey up against salt-water-summer vocals and backs it up with a track that plucks itself out of the dancehalls of Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s effervescent, glorious, lollipop music.
Carl Nilsson-Polias
