Artist of the Week: El Guincho

Hometown: Barcelona, Spain
Fun Fact: Album title Alegranza! roughly translates to “joy” in Spanish and is also an island in the Canary Islands. El guincho is a rare, endangered bird from that area.
Why He’s Worth Watching: El Guincho’s sample-cluttered, buoyant avant-pop pulls in a world-wide array of sounds to captivate passive listeners and rowdy dancers alike.
For Fans Of: Panda Bear/Animal Collective, Gilberto Gil, Brian Wilson

It takes ninety seconds of El Guincho's "Antillas" to feel slightly uneasy. The stuttering polyrhythms and carnival motifs hammer on, cyclic and unremitting. Finally, nearing the four-minute mark, a cymbal crash ushers in a euphoric climax, layers of chiming melodies and pattering drums cascading through the mix: Sweet, strange relief through deferred resolution.

The man behind the song, Barcelona author-gone-musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa, had just this in mind when he crafted it. While much of debut LP Alegranza! springboards off sun-soaked remnants from his old (and soon-to-be-revived) pop band Coconot, tracks like “Antillas” and “Kalise” have more visceral goals. “What I wanted to do was have this excessive repetition,” says Díaz-Reixa, “just to see how it makes the listener feel atrapado en el sonido—trapped in the sound—and almost feel bad about it. Well, not bad, but anxious... And then when you get to the second part of the song you can breathe. I think it’s a really cool sensation, that contrary, contrast."

As El Guincho locks in a listener, his carefully calibrated espectro musical also opens up wide, showcasing bricolage constructions that Díaz-Reixa likens to Legos (“where you place different kinds of pieces all over”). And with a bit of the Oceanic stimulation that characterized late ‘50s exotica, the ebullient Alegranza! coils together Brazilian Tropicália’s jangling baile and Afrobeat’s shuffling syncopation, all the while injecting cassette-tape field recordings and samples from Díaz-Reixa’s Canary Islands birthplace. “I think it's all the sound from the earth,” he says. “It doesn't matter if you were born in California or Singapore or Sidney. It’s just sound. I think it's the same for me to sample a band from the Canary Islands as if a Swedish guy does it. In fact, if a Swedish guy does it, it could be interesting to hear how he works with sounds that are not familiar to him.”

The immersive listening commanded by Alegranza! also has roots in Díaz-Reixa’s love for production nuance. J Dilla's instrumental hip-hop opus Donuts inspired him to buy a sampler in the first place, and the guiding light of Alegranza!'s recording sessions was the work of Mexican bandleader and stereo-recording pioneer Esquivel!. But to talk about El Guincho’s music only in terms of headphone-appreciation is to miss the madcap revelry of his live shows: They instigate dancing so infectious that party-bent Spanish audiences pulled away from the hardcore techno music craze of bakalao to seek them out.

Which comes back to those clutches of El Guincho’s repetition, so full of care after all. “Using the same little bits of sounds again and again and again” Díaz-Reixa says of the dovetail between his and house music, “I think it's something that's very human.”

Listen to El Guincho's "Antillas" from Alegranza!: