El Guincho

“A unique, exotic thrill from beginning to end” – Uncut. Deee-Lite may have sung about the global village and the age of communication back in 1990, but it’s taken until the 21st century for that dream to become a reality in music. Now the new world music has arrived and nobody presents it better than 24 year old Pablo Diaz-Reixa aka El Guincho, a musician based in Barcelona and raised in the Canary Islands, who feeds traditional island song, African rhythms and sampled psychedelics through an MPC500 to create something entirely new. ‘Palmitos Park’, the first single from his ‘Alegranza’ debut album, gets the party started with an infectious Spanish chorus, male harmonies and the sounds of a village cheering and celebrating. Then there’s the rustic rave of ‘Cuando Maravilla Fui’, with its pulsating peasant chanting, as if to raise the dead. ‘Buenos Matrimonios Ahi Fuera’ breezes the sounds of offshore winds and tinkling percussion through childlike playground choruses. And when ‘Fata Morgana’ begins, it’s as if somebody is opening the curtains onto the glorious technicolor of 1970s sunshine, with wonky old analogue synths that warp in the heat. He might be named after a bird from the Canaries that always flies alone, but El Guincho’s music finds common ground in the global transfusions of MIA and CSS, the gypsy spirit of Gogol Bordello and the ice cream layering of Four Tet and Animal Collective. Yet his music is also thick with the surf’s up happiness of the Beach Boys, the whizz bang thrills and spills of tropicalistas like Os Mutantes, and the magic realism that inspired Pablo’s literature, bringing musical ghosts to life in the eternal sunshine of the present.