Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #54: Kuroma - In New York, Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Mix)

Weekly mp3 #53: Kuroma - In New York Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Mix)
This fine track comes to you courtesy of Mountain Dew. (Haha, what?) Yeah, they've started a web label thing. The El Guincho mix is the second one down if the crap interface is not helping.

This really is ridiculously tropical sounding, if you include having some kind of weird fever with accompanying hallucinations as part and parcel with being in the tropics. What was a fairly straight (and fairly shit) 60s-ish poppy song is mixed into a swung thing that sounds like layers of digitally-generated analogues of marimbas (ahaha). Pizzicatto synth plucks jab away at the top end. The beat suggests all that post-Dilla instrumental hip-hop stuff, but the instrumentation is really bright and cheery. Vocals from the original are reduced to fragments, repitched, slurring, and reversing as required.

Someone somewhere made some reference to a psychedelic Spongebob Squarepants and I can see why.

I have no idea who Kuroma is / are or why he / they took the Japanese word for "car" as a name, and am really not interested. It's the substantial distance from the original that gives this mix any chance to be good, I reckon. El Guincho is yet another one-man production outfit, Pablo Díaz-Reixa. He's from Spain. He played my town recently and I didn't bother to go because he seemed young and trendy. Gah, if only I was joking. Gah, classic example of the DJ = producer conflation I complained about a while back.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 6:00 PM