Weekend in the ciudad

Zizek and Afrodita give the lowdown on
high-tech, street-level Latino beats

SHOCKING CONSCIOUSNESS: Afrodita

By JACK OATMON

New songs of poverty, struggle, happiness and freedom regularly explode onto the world stage, whisked along the wires to our mp3-hungry ears, and Latin America’s steaming, dusty ghettos have long been fertile ground for such sounds. This weekend gives you two chances to catch up with some of the beats that are rocking the clubs way down south, as Mexico City’s Aztec synth-punk duo Afrodita unleash their loco libidos at the second edition of Cucurama!, while the minds behind Buenos Aires’s digital folk party Zizek give Club Lambi a lesson in cumbia.

Cumbia is a broad mix of lethargic four-on-the-floor beats, frenetic hand drumming and squealing squeezeboxes which first developed in Colombia generations ago, rooted in the musical culture that swept into the Americas during the slave trade. After over a century as a folk style for the impoverished, and then eventually spreading across South America as love ballads and sugary pop, it landed in Argentina. There, cumbia saw a radical transformation as economic crises ravaged the country at the turn of the millennium, making for a high-tech, low-budget sound reminiscent of and concurrent with North America’s hip hop. A lot more poor people meant a lot more street culture, and cumbia villera, a gritty, downtrodden ghetto variant, sprang into pop culture. Argentine cumbia is now something soulful, street savvy and buzzing with the eclecticism of the digital age.

Diego Bulacio, aka Villa Diamante (after the Buenos Aires neighbourhood he began DJing in), is a cumbia producer and a founding resident DJ at club night Zizek. “We decided to try a club where you could dance to hip hop, dancehall, reggaeton, cumbia and a bunch of sounds in the same night,” explains Bulacio. “That’s something that didn’t exist in Buenos Aires before.”

Beyond bridging the gap between the past and the present of cumbia and uniting several genres, Zizek’s organizers also connect the extremely local neighbourhood music of their friends with the far-flung.

“I get the music from local producers who are friends and play at Zizek often,” Bulacio says. “Also from mp3 blogs, Soulseek, forums, MySpace contacts. In my sets, there is a certain search for new sounds, and sounds rarely heard before. My own mash-ups and pirated music wouldn’t be allowed on the radio, and I find a lot of music on the Web that radios here don’t know about yet.”

Spastic Aztecs

DIAMOND LIFE:
DJ Villa Diamante

Over 7,000 kilometres northwest of Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, Afrodita is a duo uniting Latino history with modern lo-fi digital culture in a completely different manner. Their Aztec imagery, tinny software synths and chaotic mysticism provide a window into the minds of Mexico’s urban youth.

“Aztec history is taught from elementary school,” write Karin Burnett and Immanuel Miralda via e-mail. “But something tragic is happening, because we speak less and less about our past. That’s why we, just like the Aztec dancers in front of Mexico City’s cathedral, want to remember where we come from and try to create a consciousness that can be shocking.”

The nervous angst of Mexico City’s club music also speaks to the conflict and tragedy often surrounding the people’s lives, such as the recent case of police raids leading to a dozen kids getting trampled to death in the News Devine nightclub, which was linked to police negligence.

“Here there are a lot of police in rich areas of the city,” Burnett and Miralda respond when asked about the deaths. “But in poor neighbourhoods, they’re almost nonexistent—they don’t dare to go in. They place a lot of alcohol meters all over the city, and around the corner, the same cops are robbing an old lady. Cops in Mexico are frightening but with a couple of pesos, you can get rid of them. Giuliani came to Mexico City to apply the zero-tolerance method he applied in New York, and the only thing he left was a huge army of badly paid cops who need to complete their weekly income.”

Zizek DJs Villa Diamante, Chancha Via Circuito,
Oro11 and Fauna, with DJ Khiasma, are at Club Lambi
on Friday, July 11, 10 p.m., $12. Afrodita join Sonido
Changorama, Alexandra and the Herrings and Sonido
Nordico at Cucurama! 2 at Club Lambi on Saturday,
July 12, 9 p.m., $10