ZZK Records®

Rodante - Vinyl Sampler

Third chapter of the laboratory of dance. Begged for by dancers and beat hunters, the debut from Chancha Vía Circuito (Pig on the Circular Train), Pedro Canale´s alter-ego, is a collection of cumbia songs that range from introspective to festive. Rodante is a raucous journey on a runaway train. Striking an unprecedented balance, Chancha´s rhythms suggest a voyage from Argentina´s plains all the way to the city of Buenos Aires; contemplation of carefree country living gets swallowed by a dive into the hectic pace of city life. It´s the sound of squeaking joints underneath warm muscles. Pedro’s creation taps into his afro-dance background, his exploration of IDM, and his privileged role at Zizek nights: you´ll find him at the merch table, caring for artists´ creations as if they were his own progeny.

A lover of all things dance, his album includes remixes (Con la Misma Moneda, Zorzal, Día Libre) and collaborations with artists from all over the spectrum (Jahdan, Princesa, Rancho MC, Poeta Inka, and Kumbha Kethu). Melodies bring dance and trance together and create scenarios that celebrate and pay homage to their roots.

Chancha Via Circuito - ZZK Records from ZZK Records on Vimeo.

CHANCHA VIA CIRCUITO: HYPER-IMPULSE FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

‘I like the one with the little train.’ (Diplo).

Click click. Clank clank. Click click. Buzzing. Thick. Sweet. Intense. Natural sounds, such as those coming from your neighbor’s garden (a cricket rubbing its legs together), metal sounds (a gun being used as a hammer), and the classic cumbia-like sounds of a guiro (a Maraca-like instrument).

This is how Rodante gets started. Chancha Vía Circuito’s first album (and the third of ZZK Records!) is a journey through different hypnotic melodies that gradually converge along the way. Pedro Canale is a young producer from the south of Greater Buenos Aires who connects two different dance environments – those belonging to popular culture and those that have yet to be explored as such. In a way, he connects the outskirts to the highly populated center. In this 21st century on hyperdrive, the challenge is in mantaining your balance and fortifying your core while you stay closely connected with the periphery. Song names like Turdera or Calzada, are names of train stations on the outskirts of the city. Pedro has a background in afro-dance, colorful murgas (marching bands) and minimal dub elements, IDM, and downtempo. He brings murgas to electronic music – murgas are dance battles and colorful parades traditionally held in Buenos Aires in the summer. During the dictatorship in the late 70s/early 80s they were forbidden by the military government. Now they´re popular neighborhood street fairs in Buenos Aires and city outskirts. Pedro previously experimented with all these elements under the name Universildo and brings them to fruition as Chancha.

His first five-song EP is one of the best-sold and best-received of all the merch on the table at Zizek and has left fans craving more. It was enough for Diplo (Mad Decent) to get excited and decide to include it in his ‘Soy Cumbia’ mix. His melodies draw strength from tiny trains, vehicles that have already been disqualified in the race into the future (dominated by computers and cars) but that continue steadfast and lyrical. Tracks are rife with the sensuality of dance and create a fantasy world made up of sound bites and bleeps. Imagine a surreal train journey with your head hanging out of the window, listening to the conductor call out the names of the stations along the edge of the forest. Everything coincides; sparks fly off the tracks, the train clanks in rhythm, steam emits, there´s the repetitive audio of the entire dance, nearly without interruption. A vendor hawks cds of ballads and a girl picks up her cellphone, in love with the caller on the other end.
Like fine wine, Chancha's music retains something of the soil that produced it. There´s a certain mix of elements, a product of a specific environment that gives the music a unique flavor, making it easy to identify yet dificult to categorize.

MINI INTERVIEW with PEDRO, THE LION OF DANCE

After listening to your record every which way (headphones, high volume at home, on the dance floor, etc.), I decided it´s a record that´s just really easy to connect to. How do you work?

Ha! One time Guille (Canale, a.k.a. DJ Nim) said to me, ‘Man, this is good! It sounds amazing, what’s your secret?’ Basically, when you work with Fruity Loops you have the chance to build your tracks sound by sound. So you get to put together an entire drum kit by using cricket sounds in place of a high hat. Or whatever you want. I choose every single sound and I make it come out the way I need it to. And every sound has its own frequency and equalization; I move from the micro to the macro level. Most important, it all happens in an intuitive way, without preconception.

Even though you recorded it using software, it sounds completely organic!

Sometimes it just happens that way. I love it, I mean I like natural sounds as much as synthesized tones. I´m way into both.

What can you tell us about your collaborations and guest spots?

The collaborations came out of passing tracks around to vocalist friends and to the emcees I like. Something funny happened with the track that features Jahdan, a Brooklyn emcee. I played the beat for a lot of people out here but they weren’t into it, I mean, they thought it was too ‘dark’ or something. DJ Rupture asked me if he could give it to a friend of his in the States. Jahdan was down and he laid out a sick rhyme, I love what he did to it. There’s also a good story about the song ‘Zorzal’, by Axel Krygier. I was working on a rhythm at home when I heard my girlfriend Sol singing the song in the kitchen. Together, it sounded great! So we decided to record it.

What about Kumbha Kethu’s spot? She really set the tone for ‘Bosques Via Temperley.’

Right? Kumbha Kethu is my friend Rocio, a girl I wasn´t feeling when we first met because she came off kind of arrogant. Later on, my brother Manuel became tight with her and I got to know her better. She would sing over tracks off the Internet, mostly without even knowing where they came from. One day I heard her sing and I really liked it, so I played this track for her –Selva– to see what her reaction was, but it didn´t work out for her. ‘Bosques’ wasn´t meant for her originally, I was going to sing on it, but she came up with lyrics, melody, and it was like, wow, she owned it.

According to you, what’s the ideal way to listen to ‘Rodante?’

I think it’s good to listen to while you´re dancing or in transit on a train or on a bus.

How important is dance for you? Did it influence your recording of the album?

I think it’s one of the most beautiful ways that people express themselves. I’ve felt the need to make music for people to dance to for a long time. The rhythm just happened somewhere along the way.

What pops into your head when you think of cumbia?

I have some really great memories. A little while ago I read something Dick El Demasiado wrote, an anthropological study on the history of cumbia, it was crazy! He discovered cumbia the same way I did. He calls it "Servants´music." It was for the woman who works cleaning houses, we´d drop off the cleaning lady at her house, in a neighborhood pretty far away. You heard it in poorer neighborhoods, driving down the street you´d hear the "chick chicky chick" of cumbia. That was where the cumbia was. Then when we got older it entered the main stream. In my house, we listened to other kinds of music, from Europe or Latin America or the U.S. One time, I was going through some cassettes and I found a tropical song from the 60s, it was great! I used to listen to it a lot.

What did you think of ‘cumbia villera’ (ghetto/gangster cumbia) when it came out? Do you remember the first impression it made on you?

I thought it was really bad. At first listen, it was totally wrong. It was disrespectful to the music. Our neighbors would listen to Damas Gratis on high volume and I was like, “What the hell are they listening to?” You went out and every club was playing nonstop cumbia villera. It was overkill. Years later I revisited it, like 2 or 3 years back, when I started hunting down all kinds of Latin American genres and I learned to appreciate the distinctive characteristics of folk music traditions from all over. I discovered Colombian cumbia, Mexico’s sonidero, Peru’s chicha (thanks to Sonido Martines by the way), the folk music of Northern Argentina, etc. That’s when you realize that Argentina’s cumbia music has certain sounds that cannot be found anywhere else. It’s really dirty, and its keyboard sounds are really authentic. It’s like the music from the worst video games ever. That’s what attracted me to it the most.

OK, last question. What do you see from the Zizek DJ booth?

I see an audience that´s fresh, kids who come out to really dance, who pay attention to the music and really listen, who are interested in what’s going on and enjoy it all.

Text & Interview by DJ Campeon
Translation by Eve Hyman

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Chancha Vía Circuito website