Interview with Gustavo Santaolalla

Interview with Bajofondo's leader Gustavo Santaolalla.

Don't call Bajofondo a revisionist tango band anymore or you'll raise the back hairs of its leader, Gustavo Santaolalla. The band, whose name loosely translates to "below the surface," is an eight-member ensemble of South American musicians who have created a generational language that fuses Latin alternative rock with the rich musical blends that thrive along the Argentine-Uruguayan border.

"We don't like the label 'electronic tango,' " Santaolalla says in Spanish. "What we do is a mixture of music that draws from the influences along the Rio de la Plata (the river that forms part of the border between Argentina and Uruguay), and tango is a part of that, along with milonga and candombe, but then you have what the rest of the band brings to it that adds elements of rock, electronica and hip-hop."

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Gotan Project at Womad

At long last the French masters of the contemporary tango Gotan Project, are set to play in New Zealand this March. The full 10 piece ensemble of Gotan Project will perform in at Womad in New Plymouth Friday evening March 16th. Described as ‘intoxicating tango chic’, Gotan Project has developed a new style by combining classical tango, nightclub beats with dub, hip-hop and jazz influences along with visuals and live performance to create a rich and sensual musical experience.

Gotan Project consists of a core nucleus of three French musicians: Phillippe Cohen Solal, Eduardo Makaroff and Christoph H. Mueller, all with an equal love of traditional Argentinean tango. Drawing on everything from Jamaican dub music and hip-hop to ambient drift, Gotan Project re-shapes tango with a contemporary dance feel whilst retaining tango’s soulful beauty.

Accompanying the core Gotan Project performers, the full ensemble consists of two DJ’s, an enigmatic lead singer, a live tango band performing against a backdrop of archival footage and visual images to help bring the essence of tango sensuality alive.

With an already substantial ‘tango loving’ following, many others may be surprised to find that they too have enjoyed Gotan Project’s works when watching Sex in the City, Nip/Tuck or the famous romantic dance scene with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez in the smash hit, Shall We Dance.

Gotan Project’s debut album La Revancha Del Tango, has sold over a million copies and the current album Lunatico has topped the itunes charts across Europe, debut at #1 on itunes Australia’s club chart and once again New Zealand is one of their strongest per capita sales territories.

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Interview with The Gotan Project

It's like a weird underground current. With no discernible publicity or public profile, somehow the grungy Brixton Academy in London has filled up with an eclectic crowd of thousands, a crowd that ranges from greying hi-fi boffins to the scarily young and pierced, to see a band occupying a niche for electronic tango. Months later, in Munich, that current only seems to have gathered force. Are there any tickets for the Gotan Project? Am I kidding? A German shrug. "We have been sold out six weeks now."

The three musical collaborators at the heart of the Gotan Project are almost as diverse as the crowd. Eduardo Makaroff, an Argentinian guitarist steeped in the traditions of tango, is a genial paterfamilias; Christoph H. Mueller, who is Swiss but met his fellow Gotans in the musical melting pot of Paris, is a casting agency's serious musical experimentalist; and French MC Philippe Cohen Solal, true to the spirit of rock'n'roll, doesn't emerge from his hotel room until the interview is almost over.

On stage, however, he manages to be a powerful presence even from his position at the back of the stage, standing at the keyboard behind a great gang of acoustic players, a piano and the lushly glamorous vocalist, Cristina Vilallonga. Suited and booted, as they all are, in white, he conducts his own beats with a flourish reminiscent of Kraftwerk in their most cabaret moments. The weave of sounds is infectious - Gotan is, apparently, the dance downloader's favourite - but it is also constantly surprising.

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Bajofondo Tango Club

Bajofondo Tango Club, a tango-meets-electronic-music project directed by Gustavo Santaolalla, came aboard Friday in the Allen Room as a satellite event in Lincoln Center's festival for the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov.

Mr. Santaolalla is a leader in the international movement to widen pop music: an Argentine rock musician who in the 1990's became one of the world's great record producers - Café Tacuba's brilliant "Reves/Yosoy" is sufficient proof - and more recently one of the film industry's favorite soundtrack composers. (His score for "Brokeback Mountain" is an Academy Award nominee this year.)

You can find the full review here