Travel and Arts journalist, Eve Hyman, writes about emerging South American artists from her hub in old Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Lagartijeando

At the crossroads of reggaeton and electronica, Lagartijeando’s cumbia makes a push for Latin desert folk and video game distraction alike.  On his version of “Kalima” the Lizard Kid rips apart Montreal producer heavyweight Ghislain Poirier’s track, reconstructing it with a desert playground sensibility – adding futuristic flash and unconventional sonic boom.

The Kalima remix is a cumbia effort, but Lagartijeando spends a lot of time with folklore too, local folk rhythms from Argentina and other countries of the Andes, where a wide range of drum patterns make a colorful palate for the beat maker.  Neo Bailongo is the producer’s first record as Lagartijeando, out on ZZK Records.

Raised on rhythms of the Argentinian backwoods, Matias Zundel dips his dance tracks in country folk gold where chacareras, huaynos, and vidalas two-step with jungle and electronica.

“Lagartijeando” is the act of being a lizard; slithering tongue, leathery skin, and dragon-like form in a compact package.  Tracks from Neo Bailongo feel like a conversation between contrasting characters, like extraterrestrial ethnicities converging at the club. There isaccordion laced with sonic bleeps and pops, dub beats with organ melody.  There are break downs where the starry desert sky battles the urban skyline.

Shaman chant and charango guitar loops are the backbone of Lagartijeando’s signature style.  Native voices are the backbeat to percussion and bass tracks with organ melodies combining cumbia and psychedelic noise.  Songs give deference to ritual and maintain respect for tradition while pushing the old into a cosmic space future.

Matias takes his cue from the shaman, human vehicle of centuries of wisdom. He song writes about the curative effects of plants, the connection between air and earth, the rhythm of land and sea.  Chants are harmonies that call down the spirits through trance and story.  When he borrows indigenous chant for a sample, he does so with obvious respect for its source.

The producer was raised on an audio diet mixed up with folklorico, cumbia tropical, drum and bass, and rock.  He hails from Dolores, a small town 3 hours from Buenos Aires where indigenous history and cowboy violence has been documented in folklore and gaucho song.  Sound effects blend with accordion and dub samples in a dance fantasy heightened by hallucinogenic plants. Afro-Peruvian call to drum evokes the Amazon, blips and bleeps turn that visual into video game landscape.

Lagartijeando desert landscape

Lagartijeando mines natural South American sounds at their place of origin and concocts his own blend of local sonic spice.  In Dolores where he grew up, a local gaucho would storytell with his guitar for hours by the campfire, then pass out from the effort.  Matias’ childhood was seeped in the rituals of the gauchos, nomadic figures, born of two cultures, accepted by neither.  Artistic curiosity sent him traveling, as he puts it, to find the center of the world.  First he went to Buenos Aires where he discovered electronic music with friends and nights out in the explosive club scene.  But he decided the center could be better found in dramatic natural settings.  (He hasn’t been to New York City!) He left Argentina and went on to Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Bolivia.  In a mountain oasis he found what the shamans call “the other side of the mirror” and he recorded it, on his mobile studio.

Carnabailito, sayas, and roots cumbia were there in the mirror.  Fantasy and fable to be recorded and shared.  Step onto the Lagartijeando dance floor – desert covered in a storm of stars.  Stay up on future exploits from the Argentine artist who treks both Bolivian jungle and Oaxacan desert bringing new focus to far off inspiration from the gods of sci-fi pan-Latin dance.

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