The career of the Gran Canaria-born musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa seems to work in an accelerated time-frame, speeding through decades and eras as he develops his sound. Though he has always worked with digital technology, his early work sounded archaic, its massed carnival percussion and traditional melodies roaming around the Afro-Latin diaspora.
Then, on 2008's Pop Negro, he embraced modernism, albeit still with a retro twist, rigorously examining and adopting the high-gloss production and songwriting techniques of the biggest mainstream American and Latino pop acts of the mid-1970s to mid-'90s. Finally, here, he is barrelling into the future, with a new sonic style based on digital dancehall and the million flavours of autotuned pop that you can hear blasting from shops and taxis the world over.
The whole thing is glitched, processed and tweaked to within an inch of its life at every turn. In dramatic contrast to the ultra-high fidelity recording of real instruments and voices on Pop Negro, here the sources of anything in the mix – physically or culturally – are uncertain. Yet impressively, this is not just an electronica record, nor is it a glutted collage: it is, just like all previous El Guincho albums, a singer-songwriter album at heart, with a clear and singular musical vision binding it all together, and a virtuosic understanding of how studio technique (digital or physical) works as music.
It just happens that this vision is of a kaleidoscopic global marketplace full of hybrid vigour born of bootlegging and hustling, where Caribbean, Asian, Latin, Arab, African and more voices all shimmer and blur into each other in a billion variations, swamping Euro/American monocultures, rendering absolutely irrelevant any distinction between pop and avant-garde, and bubbling up constant new visions of a post-human near future. It's dizzying, yes, but like a great science fiction author Díaz-Reixa takes you on a ride that is mind-frazzling, sometimes scary, yet beautiful and hopeful too.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Comix"
