I Went To See A Band...

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The story of the employee run co-ops is told here, in this great documentary.
The Take, by Naomi Klein.

And here is a link to an article about Chilavert in particular.

Imprenta Chilavert: la histora de una fábrica recuperada | La tinta

Diálogo con Martín Cossarini, miembro de la imprenta Chilavert, sobre la experiencia de esta Fábrica Recuperada que, hoy en día, funciona activamente.

latinta.com.ar

 

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Delfina Cheb, a recently released song.

 

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Bianca Cabili, a song from the album she released earlier this year.

 

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Bela Zugasti, from her recent album.

 

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Kaleema, from an album of songs she did. Sometimes she does extended DJ sets, other times individual songs. This was remixed by Numa Gama, a great musician from Brazil who lives in Berlin now.

 

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The first “punk rock” record I bought was Patti Smith's debut, Horses, in 1975.
and for the first five years or so, “punk” was a way of thinking, not a particular genre of music.
There was a pretty wide range of sounds, and a lot of women involved-
Alice Bag and the Bags, Johanna Went, X, The Avengers and Frightwig and L7 and Phranc, just in California,
X Ray Specs and Souixie and the Banshees, the Slits and Liliput, and many more.
Most of the punk rock that holds its power today, to me, is the music made by women, queers, and weirdos, not by suburban jocks.

So when I saw Blanca Teta a couple of weeks ago at Niceto, I immediately thought- THIS is punk.
Totally non-commercial, except they actually have been touring globally to pretty good receptions.
They are, as they say, Big in Japan. And Bangkok. And Amsterdam.
The bill themselves as “transfeminist” grrl noise punk.
Which is pretty accurate.

They came out to the darkened stage looking like Sicario Angels of Death attending a wedding-
Carola, the drummer, was actually wearing what looked like a large white lace wedding dress, and the other three were wearing white lace veils draped over baseball caps.
For the first song it was pretty impossible to determine gender, until the veils started falling off due to energetic dancing, although they leaned female.
Female Ravens in a trans motorcycle gang.

There is one male in the group, Genosidra, who is more goth than macho.

They live all over the world, and all play in other bands and collaborations, and get together once in a while to tour, and record.
Three are Argentine, the fourth Columbian.
They defy the Ramones Template of punk- no guitars. Seldom chords. Zero Macho Energy.

The lead instrument is a cello, played by Violeta Garcia with atheletic, chaotic energy, at various points entwined in an almost sexual embrace, or having wrestled it to the floor and subdued it. A little John Cale, a little Mahvishnu Orchestra, a lot of pushing the cello into the realm of powerful noise.
The bass line is sometimes straight ahead, other times heavily processed into other dimensions.
Live, the entire band is pretty electronically altered, and the lead singer was wearing, like a gigantic belt buckle, a synthesizer/sampler/midi trigger strapped to her waist, using it to trigger samples and beats, manipulate and distort her voice, and generally add to the general chaos.
Some of the songs are pretty straight ahead punk laments about post-capitalist distopia, boredom, familiar punk themes,
but the vocals, just like the rest of the band, are likely to wander off in toouter space, howls, screams, spoken word, or just dry up while thel ead singer crowd surfs and the other three build up walls of reverberating subsonic vibrations you feel in your innards.

Niceto was packed, it holds 1500, and the crowd was pogoing.
A lot of people knew the lyrics.

Good to see that, 50 years on, punk is alive and well, adapting to new ideas and technologies, and still making conservative old people uncomfortable.

The Kids Today, in my estimation, are still Allright.

This video sounds cleaner and nicer than they did live- its from the board, I think, and doesnt capture the pure sonic power or the incredible loudness which add a lot to the physical experience. They are scarier in real life, as intended.

 

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As a more civilized, restrained adult experience, to balance out the punk madness,
we went to see Juana Molina, who did a 3 night residency debuting her new album,
Doga, at La Trastienda, in San Telmo.

We sat at a table in the balcony, with table service for drinks and picadas, acting our age, more or less.
La Trastienda has recently remodeled and its cleaner, nicer, and a great place to see music. Sound, lights, and sightlines are all good,
and the main floor was packed with 500 or so people standing up.

The new album, the first album of new songs in 8 years, was co-produced by Emilio Haro, who has been doing a lot of great records lately.
Usually Juana produces her own records, but Haro stirred things up a bit, which I, personally, like.
I think I own all of Juana's albums, and I love them.
This one is more layered and a bit hazy, in a good way, not as precisely controlled as her last couple.
Its more relaxed, experimental, and varied.

She did throw in a few old standards at Trastienda,
and the live performances vary a bit from the studio ones,
as she was playing in a duo with her long time collaborator and drummer Diego López de Arcaute,
so they played versions the two of them could do live.

She was wearing a kind of dog outfit her daughter made for her, which was not too literal, but it did inspire her to bark and howl once in a while.

My opinion is that she was pretty relaxed on stage- we saw her on night 2 out of 3, and she was adlibbing, joking, doing a bit of physical comedy, as she does, but seemed very happy, not nervous.
Live, she is always the consumate professional, and she is coming off of shooting two seasons of the Netflix show “En El Barro”, in which she plays a strange Puck-like character in the Women's Prison, who is maybe crazy, or maybe not...
This is the first television show she has done in decades, and it seems to have loosened her up in a funny way.

Juana is one of the very few Argentine musicians today who has worldwide audiences, not just spanish speaking ones, and this album was immediately reviewed in Pitchfork, among other sites.
She is playing in Mar de Plata this coming week, and, no doubt, will be touring it in Asia, North and South American, and Europe.
I always recommend Juana to pretty much everyone.
Whatever she does.
I have to listen to a record at least ten times to really understand it, but I like this one a lot already.

 

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One of the things I love about Buenos Aires is that so many musicians live here,
or return here to visit, and constantly play in different groupings.
Sure, you can go to Niceto and see a concert by a band like La Portuaria,
which has been around for 35 years, and they will play songs from their albums.

But you can also see a constantly changing and mutating array of musicians doing new things, rearranging old things, and rotating the players in a thousand different ways.
I enjoy how much I learn each time I see a show, and how any given grouping of musicians will lead me to a bunch of other musicians, and other bands.
Its the way I continue to learn more about the past, and the future.

I have been a Barbara Togander fan for something like 10 years, when I saw her sit in at La Grande, but I only have a few scraps of her recorded music.
The first time I saw her, she was, by her standards, relatively sedate, doing what was pretty sophisiticated scat singing, somewhat related to jazz, with the big band at La Grande.
It was striking, but I had no idea what she is actually capable of.

She has been living in Barcelona lately, after something like 30 years in Argentina.
She is an improvisor, someone who is always effortlessly avante garde, and when I heard she was back in Argentina briefly, I immediately bought tickets to a couple of different shows she was doing.


First, at Roseti, a night of several different women who do what we used to call “new music” back in the seventies.
The first artist, Ana Dulce, was actually drawing her songs with big pen that was triggering her synths and samples, and sometimes singing along.
Performance, art, and music all in one.

Then Romina Pechin, singing to electronics and beats.

Finally, Barbara Togander, improvising with Javier Bustos.
Bustos builds his own instruments, and tonight he was mainly playing a very large multistringed insturment, which could be plucked, bowed, tapped, strummed, or hit, along with some electronic percussion.
For some reason he has a cable plugged into the back of his shoe.

Togander was dj-ing, with the classic two turntables, but she is a very unusual turntablist, who makes sounds, not exactly beats.
A lot of her records were actually spoken word, not music, and then, they were sped up and slowed down, processed, looped, or just scratched. She also sings, although not often in recognizable languages, even though she speaks a half dozen fluently.
The result is layered, sometimes rthymic and sometimes most decidedly not.
It was magical and transported me, and they were definitely playing off each other, responding to each others moves, in a way that only someone who is very self assured and very professional can do.
There was no song, no beat, no road map.
Everytime she plays, its different, and so this video of her in Spain recently gives you an idea of what she can do, but what we saw was unique to that time and place.

 

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Here is a little clip of Ana Dulce drawing a song.

Dispositivo de ruidujo en vivo

This is "Dispositivo de ruidujo en vivo" by Ana Dulce Collados on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

vimeo.com

 

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Javier Bustos playing a lot of things.

And here is a recording of him playing the instrument he had that night at Roseti.