Focus on Argentina: Barem

Focus on Argentina: Barem

7 December, 2010 | 5.26AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: argentina, barem, focus on

This month, we spin our globe to Argentina, a country that’s come to have an ever larger impact on the worldwide electronic-music scene, but about which many northern listeners know very little—perhaps understandably, given the distances involved.

Fortunately, our tour guide for the first installment of Focus on Argentina is Mauricio Barembuem, aka Barem. Since 2005, his releases and remixes on labels like Foundsound, Spectral and of course Minus have earned him the role of one of the key ambassadors of Argentina’s underground scene.

The role suits him: Barem has clearly spent plenty of time thinking about that makes Argentina’s electronic-music scene special. Read on for his in-depth perspective.

Tell us a little bit about the scene in Argentina. What are the main clubs in your city? What styles are popular? What local DJs and producers should we know about? Where do the parties take place—clubs, underground venues, chiringuitos?

Well, the scene now is pretty open. It seems like a lot of people like a bunch of different styles and it’s going back to being interesting after a few years of a strange vibe. The main big clubs in Buenos Aires are Pacha, State and Crobar. There are also cool smaller clubs like Bahrein, the Shamrock, and Cocoliche among a few others who usually do more underground nights.

The countryside has also some great spots. For example, there’s a province called Cordoba, which is in my opinion the best place in the country for electronic music, and there are also cool things happening in beach cities like Mar del Plata and Villa Gesell mostly during the summer. But I hear more and more about new cool places in other cities, so it’s really becoming progressively wider at the moment.

It’s very interesting to see how in difficult times you have to adapt to keep growing. Eventually you can jump back in the loop and give things to the scene that compensate your actions. That’s what a lot of us did and in retrospective it was a positive thing.

Stylistically, as I said, it’s pretty open right now. There used to be a big trance scene, another big progressive house scene, a small but nice drum and bass movement, and a nice, fast-growing techno/tech-house and house scene. These movements are still there, but I’ve noticed how the different crowds are starting to merge a bit instead of being totally isolated from each other like in the past five years or so.

It’s hard to talk about local DJs, because there are a lot of them. Ever since the digital revolution happened, when, for example, the so-called minimal techno group of Argentineans (including myself) started traveling the world, everything became possible for a lot of artists. In fact, some of the European purists who hate MP3’s and digital DJing often don’t realize how hard it was in countries like this to succeed before the digital format took over. I can’t really count how many artists from every style started releasing good records and going on small and bigger tours since then, but I would say at least between 25 and 30.

For now, I will name the ones that inspired me the most when I started Djing: Carlos Alfonsin, Cristobal Paz, Simbad, Dany Nijensohn, Sr Replicante, Franco Cinelli, Jorge Savoretti, Lucas Mari, and Violett. There are also some producers out there who are starting to become popular like Ronan Portela, Alexis Cabrera, Leo Grünbox, Pablo Denegri, etc, who now started to join the ones who got successful in the past years. Finally, you should check some labels like Unlock Recordings, Igloo, Caramba Recs, Miniatura Records, Groovear, Arjaus, MindTrip Music, Traut Muzik, Eat More Beef, and the mighty, brand-new Savor by Jorge Savoretti, which is my favorite at the moment.

About parties, in general they take place in clubs, only a few underground venues, and I must say, with the amazing weather we have here most of the year, it is a big shame that there’s not much going on outdoors like chiringuitos or open air bars.

How about the history of the scene? What was it like in the ‘90s, and who were the pioneering Argentine DJs?

I was in high school when all this happened, so I missed a lot, but I know some of the history. The movement was really big on one hand and very small on the other. There were massive underground raves where collectives like Urban Groove, for example, had legendary techno events that people still talk about today. There were also more commercial DJs like DJ Dero and Aldo Hydar who also became really big playing a more mainstream kind of sound. At the same time there were extremely underground small clubs like Morocco (where Richie Hawtin came for the first time in the ‘90s), Ave Porco, afterparties like K2, etc.

In the mid ‘90s Pacha Buenos Aires started changing the whole movement by throwing parties with bigger budgets every weekend. They got the brand Cream from UK, and that was I think the beginning of the commercial scene in Argentina. People like Hernan Cattaneo were shaping that new scene that in the end, after many years of bringing international DJs and finally with the first editions of Creamfields Festival, got a lot of people into it. That particular movement became very big, and it was mostly progressive house but they also used it to promote good DJs from other styles who also inspired a lot of others to make music, play music and run cool events.

Tell us a little bit about yourself: what’s your own music like? Where do you play? Do you have a residency or regular party? If so, what’s it like?

My own music has changed a bit during the years. I started playing acid house and minimal techno/house at very small parties, then begun releasing records as producer, started traveling, and nowadays, as a DJ, I think I play a lot of different music from techno to house. My production also went through changes, at the beginning being almost pure minimal techno and it progressively became more organic. Today I’m sort of mixing elements from both of those moments and adding some new ones.

I don’t really have a residency here, because I’m traveling most of the time and I’m not in Buenos Aires on a regular basis. I did in the past, but it was incredibly small. We used to be happy when we had more than 50 people in the house, hahaha! Nowadays I usually play Creamfields Festival and one or two club nights in Buenos Aires a year, plus some other cities like Cordoba and the beach cities I mentioned before during the summer.

How did you discover electronic music, and how did you come to make/play it yourself?

I used to hate clubs when I was a teenager and just stay home and play guitar. But when I was 16 I started going out more, just to be a bit more social, and I sort of got into some electronic music. Eventually I ended up in Pacha and I couldn’t get enough of it. I was there every single Saturday night and that’s where I started listening to the DJs that really got me into this music. Mostly progressive house at first, but then I got tired and moved on to other DJs who were playing techno, acid, minimal, deep house, and that’s when I said, ‘’I wanna do what these guys are doing.”

How connected is your city’s scene to other scenes in South America? Do DJs from Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay etc. often visit, or are most out-of-town guests usually from Europe and North America? Do you travel much within South America?

There are a few coming in, but most people they bring come from Europe. The importance of Europe in electronic music make people want to listen to those DJs more. It’s funny sometimes, ‘cause a lot of the DJs they bring from Europe, for example, are South Americans or North Americans. But a lot of them only become appealing to the crowd once they are playing regularly overseas. In my own experience, I don’t think even 5% of the people who know me today in Argentina had any idea who I was before I went on tour the first couple times. Not because everybody was following me when I was away, but because I almost had no chance to play here before that.

Maybe it’s just my perception, but I think a lot of other South American countries like Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador bring a lot more of our own artists to their different cities. In a way, Argentina has a very insecure society, always trying to catch up with Europe and North America, which very often leads to missing some pure talent standing right next door.

I try to travel around Latin America as much as I can, but it’s not so easy ‘cause the distances are enormous, and due to my schedule during the European summer, I can rarely come back until the winter, where I sort of decompress from the whole year, try to make some music and play in these countries as much as possible.

Argentina suffered a major economic crisis 10 years ago. What was its impact on the dance-music scene?

It didn’t affect us as much as it affected Europe in the past two years in terms of the amount of people going out. There’s a reason for that, and it’s because the majority of the people following the electronic music movement back then belonged to the middle/upper-class segment of the society. The crisis hit everybody, but at different levels, meaning that a lot of these people suffered the crisis but not at a level where they couldn’t go out any more. In fact, some of them were willing to spend more and more, since saving money became something highly untrusted by everybody. The banks and the government were literally freezing all savings accounts. Some things were different for a while of course, ‘cause our currency devaluated and promoters couldn’t bring international acts all the time, but that didn’t stop the scene. It actually helped locals to play more.

What it really affected badly was the development of new artists who were just getting started. Vinyl was extremely expensive; so were computers and any kind of equipment since it was all imported. That’s why the digital revolution was so important here. A lot of us had to move on for a while from vinyl to illegal sources of MP3s like Soulseek in order to keep developing and getting new sources of inspiration. It was impossible to keep spending money on records while you were making US$30 a gig, luckily a few times a month, and each vinyl costing $16. Only the already successful DJs or the ones with a second full-time job could somehow keep it up.

What some of us did was to invest all at once in a laptop, which we could use to make our own music and perform with some basic DJ software, mixing old vinyl and new, exciting MP3s that we couldn’t afford to buy. Others just switched to CDs, but the sources of music were exactly the same.

It’s very interesting to see how in difficult times you have to adapt to keep growing. Eventually you can jump back in the loop and give things to the scene that compensate your actions. That’s what a lot of us did and in retrospective it was a positive thing.

Obviously South America has one of the world’s richest musical traditions. How would you say that has affected Argentine dance music? Would you say your own music has a South American influence or identity?

My advice is to try as many different new things as possible, which is what I do when I travel anywhere. But don’t drink beer, it’s not special here.

I’m not very sure about this. In fact, based on the way I described Argentinean society before, I would say no. Most electronic music coming from here (including my own) was based on things happening far away. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your roots are not present. I think in many ways they are, and over the years, all the music you listen to affects your taste and your subconscious sense of rhythm and harmony. In that sense, the musical history of people coming from different parts of the world is different even if they listened to the same stuff in some moments. Everything is also affected by music you were not even paying attention to but got in your brain by repetition or something.

A good example is how often a group of new artists from a certain country becomes interesting for the global scene. There’s something they have at that point that is slightly new and exciting for everybody, while in most cases, these artists have no idea what’s the difference that people sense in their music compared to the others. The ones who do are the ones who really based their music on local musical traditions or the ones who think they are awesome, but that’s an ego and insecurity matter that has nothing to do with their roots. Personally, and based on some other people’s comments, I think my music was affected at a certain level, but I have no idea how or in which elements. I would probably hear no difference if people from far away didn’t tell me.

Enough about music: tell us some destinations that visitors to Argentina should visit—and what we should eat when we’re there.

Well, Argentina’s magic is, in my opinion, the diversity of landscapes we have. It’s a long, vertical country with completely different ecosystems. We have an amazing set of waterfalls and subtropical forest that we share with Brazil (Iguazu Falls). There’s an incredible northwest region sort of similar to the Grand Canyon, but mixed with some Star Wars sort of weirdness (Jujuy and Salta), and an amazing set of mountains dividing Argentina and Chile (Los Andes) that have an endless amount of amazing spots from north to south, which is about 3,000Kms. We have also one of the most beautiful glaciers in the world, called Perito Moreno, which is one of the few that somehow keep growing. There are many other amazing places to go, but those are the most important.

About food, we have a worldwide reputation for meat that is pretty noticeable as soon as you get here. The meat is very good ‘cause its production is not industrialized like in other countries. Most farmers grow their cows in the grasslands and just let them be. The cuts we eat are also different and that’s also why it’s not really the same. Not all of it will blow your mind, especially if you just order normal types of steaks (very common mistake), but some of it will and the standard is just very good. There are many different types of typical food, but almost all of them have meat. My advice is to try as many different new things as possible, which is what I do when I travel anywhere. Don’t drink beer, it’s not special here. Try as many wines as you can. Both Chile and Argentina have amazing wine areas on each side of the mountains where they produce incredible, world-class wines at a quality/price ratio that I’ve never seen anywhere in the world.

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