Buenos Aires – Three decades after Astor Piazzolla shook up the entrenched world of the nostalgic and sensual iconic musical genre of Buenos Aires, a phenomenon dubbed “technotango” is adding its ingredient – either blasphemous or regenerative, depending on the listener – to the mix.
Born in the poor quarters of Buenos Aires and Montevideo – across the River Plate estuary in Uruguay – at the end of the 19th century, tango now has found a new vehicle in electronic music.
“Fusion tango” or “electronic tango” are other names by which the five-year-old phenomenon is known.
Among the innovative forerunners of technotango are Gotan Project and the Bajofondo Tango Club, headed – respectively – by Argentines Eduardo Makaroff, who lives in France, and Gustavo Santaolalla, who is up for an Oscar for the soundtrack of “Brokeback Mountain.”
While some still argue about whether the critically acclaimed compositions of Piazzolla “are tango or not,” the creators of technotango see him as a kind of patron saint and imagine that if he were still alive today, he would be using computers to make his music.
“Tango was stuck in place and the danger for a culture is to change into an immobile tradition. This movement shows that new expression still can be created within tango. But I know that it shook things up, created controversy, support, resentment and hate,” Carlos Libedinsky, the leader of the upstart group Narcotango, told EFE.
Electronic tango emerges from fusing tango’s traditional instruments – like the accordion – with computers and “samplers” to create remixed themes and completely new compositions.
The new subgenre even combines the electronic sound with fragments of classical tango numbers characterized by two-four time or created by well-known musicians, including the brightest star of the music’s history, Carlos Gardel.
But the million-dollar question is whether technotango is a subgenre of tango or of electronic music. The answer depends on who you ask.
While Bajofondo and Gotan Project define their music as electronic, Miguel Di Genova of Otros Aires says that the music he makes is “90 percent tango and the rest electronic.”
“Some make electronic music and put in touches of tango, but they keep the identity of the electronic sound. Others play tango and combine it with electronics, but at its root it’s that typical tango vibe, melancholy. We keep the dirtiness, the rough sound of the tango from the ’30s and ’40s,” Di Genova said.
The members of Otros Aires, which in its live performances uses a backdrop of video screens to project dancers or other images, have an eclectic musical background, with people who come from the tango world, but also musicians who’ve proceeded through pop, Latino rhythms, rock and even punk.
The difference in each group’s technotango style is in where the emphasis is placed, on the techno element or the tango element.
In the discotheques, the “chill-out” tunes have taken over, but this musical style has also worked its way into the “milongas,” the tango dancehalls, where it is imparting new elements to the dance itself.
But fusion tango, which has carved out its own space at the 8th Tango Festival being held in Buenos Aires, has also garnered its share of criticism.
“The ‘electronicos’ are the illegitimate children of Piazzolla. They took the worst from him. There’s no richness of internal melodies and there is too much percussion,” said dancer Gustavo Benzecry Saba, the author of “Glosario de la danza de tango” (The tango dance glossary).
Benzecry Saba says that the result is simply not tango. “It’s electronic music with an accordion. If you take out the accordion, only pure electronic sounds are left. In contrast, in tango, if you take out the accordion, it’s still tango.”
The president of the Ateneo Porteño del Tango, Segismundo Holzman, says that “without losing the essence of tango, the subgenre must be respected because if it achieves a sort of alchemy it could become a variant of tango, just as Piazzolla was at one time.”
“But tango is grimy, filthy, bloody. It comes from down underneath things, and in many of these (technotango) groups there is more rock, and a lack of tango’s real essence,” he says, further spurring the ongoing controversy.
