Cumbia nueva

LATIN ROOTS Douster, El G and Fauna forge a new path.

A few years ago, the Eurocentric elite in Buenos Aires swatted down a new trend called electric tango—it was diluting a signature tradition. Meanwhile, Zizek Urban Beats Club (ZZK Club for short) was pushing a more radical update of a different musical tradition in the Argentine metropolis. As the nightclub where “the First and Third Worlds share the dance floor and make plans to hook up after the party,” it quietly flourished.

The sweaty monthly get-together highlighting mash-up collages of Latin folk and club beats enjoys more attention overseas than in South America, according to ZZK Club’s founder (and resident DJ El G), Grant Dull. “We got booked in Oslo before we got booked in Montevideo, which is just across the water,” he says. Latin Americans, he explains, are less wired than their Northern neighbors. And the mash-up artists who play the Zizek party tend to be laptop producers, swimming in a new global, digital culture. The party made a huge splash bringing digital cumbia and electro reggaeton to Europe for the first time and at the Getty Museum in California, where thousands turned out for the event. Its previous Chicago stops were poorly attended so we’ve got some catching up to do. Wednesday 8, we get a chance as Zizek’s Fauna, El G and Douster hit Sonotheque en route to the Coachella festival.

Zizek Urban Beats Club launched in 2006 and soon became the focus for avant-garde producers combining cumbia and electronic beats as it moved to hotter and bigger venues. ZZK Club has soaked up hip-hop, dancehall, reggaeton, Rio’s baile funk and even French electro through Douster, who relocated from Lyon, France. But those cumbia samples continue to distinguish the sound. Cumbia traces its origins to coastal Colombia’s slave songs and is popular with poorer Argentines, its lyrics celebrating outlaw behavior. Pablo Lezcano, the biggest cumbia star in Argentina, is even a fan of the Zizek party—he called its inciters “freaks” in the national press. And the party is credited with turning on tastemaker Diplo to the sounds of nueva cumbia when he dropped in to spin with ZZK crew. A Diplo cumbia mix and blog hosannas have followed.

Naming a party for a contemporary philosopher might seem a bit pretentious, but the Slovenia-born Marxist cultural critic Slavoj Zizek is “kind of a rock star in Argentina,” Dull says. The thinker is married to an Argentine model. Dull liked “the way he mashed up contemporary culture and contemporary thought.” Its record label, ZZK, plays down the association “to try and stop using his name so much” but is hoping to get the real Zizek on board “to freestyle over some beats” someday.

World-music purists will cringe, but the ZZK crew benefits from refusing to freeze authenticity in amber. As Dull freely admits: “What we are doing is like art house or experimental. If this stuff was played in a real cumbia club, it would not go down well.”

Zizek Urban Beats Club tour hits Sonotheque on Wednesday 8.

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