Hollow Earth

Prompted by Simon's recent "feeling" column I pursued this record. Actually I have a bit of history with Aguayo. I first came across him a couple of years ago. At that time Jess pulled rank and pointed me at a nice review he'd done in 2005. "Are you really lost" is good but his EP for Soul Jazz which I had just discovered was even better, and I think cruelly neglected. I dunno, maybe it had something to do with Soul Jazz's embarrassingly perfunctory artwork. It was one of my favorite releases of that year.

Then more crossings. On our tenth anniversary last year Catherine and I went to an illegal loft party in Hackney. Marcus had sorted the music out and (I think I'm right in saying) was responsible for bringing Matias over. Manuel did a great set too I remember. I would have been more tuned in were C and I not having the most epic fight imaginable. Lol. Then in recent months Matias contributed a brilliant mix to our favorite perennial hipster's series.

Anyway, enough of the back-story already! In a year almost over-crowded with brilliant releases: Broadcast and Focus Group's "Witchcults of the Radio Age", position normal's "position normal", Micachu's "Jewelry", Belbury Poly's "From An Ancient Star", Roj's "The Transactional Dharma Of Roj" and Dirty Projector's "Bitte Orca" -here's another. If I'm being honest I'll have to profess that this particular record feels very close to my heart. I suppose it's the Post-Modern negotiation of ethnicity that I find most satisfying as well as how it plays so beautifully into a theory which I'm writing up as a white paper for the next issue of Loops. Strict non-disclosure at this moment in time.

There is one particular shadow that is cast quite large over the disc: Argentina (check), Seductive mesh of interweaving vocals generated by one singer (check), Electro underpinning (check) - yes it's our darling Juana Molina. I do, however, believe Matias arrived at his sound in sincerity and there's a stripped-to-the-waist, hard-raving muscularity to "Ay Ay Ay" that gives it an edge over Juana's stuff. His personality, too, is less in the way. Other things I hear are, amusingly enough, all Afro-Brazilian sonix heard through the prism of the West, so here is No Smoke's "Koro Koro", Bobby Konders' "Dub Masai Style", Cultural Vibe's "Ma Foom Bey" and Liquid Liquid's "Lock Groove (Out)" but also (another instance of a view backwards through the prism) the No Wave-inflected avant-dance of Aguayo's fellow South American Naná Vasconcelos "Bush Dance".

This whole issue of ethnicity has been on mind recently as we watched "Gandhi" back-to-back with "Lawrence of Arabia". Both inscribe a very eurocentric approach towards race and colonialism which would probably have infuriated Fanon and Bhaba - personally I feel Lean's is on balance the more sophisticated negotiation. However, in the strictest auto-biographical sense both Lawrence and Gandhi (who my godfather recently revealed stayed with his grandfather on a visit to Surrey as a young solicitor) adopted in extremis the trappings of a culture they were alien to. Historically speaking, theirs was a case of a kind of a precocious Globalism, and while from the perspective of political correctness we might scoff at Lawrence's native aspirations, his free-and-easy approach to what are the supposedly sanctified trappings of ethnicity, he's actually nothing more than a manifestation of the way we all now deal with other cultures.