El Guincho - Alegranza
(CD) Beggars Group XL-361, 2008-10-21

Tracklisting :
01. Palmitos Park
02. Antillas
03. Fata Morgana
04. Kalise
05. Cuando Maravilla Fui
06. Buenos Matrimonios Ahi Fuera
07. Costa Paraiso
08. Prez Lagarto
09. Polca Mazurca

Note : El Guincho will be in concert at Les Transmusicales de Rennes on December 5th, 2008

Links :
beggarsgroupusa.com/elguincho
myspace.com/elguinch


Press Release :
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 MPC to create something entirely new.

"Palmitos Park", the first single from his Alegranza debut album 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 Maavilla 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.

Growing up in the Canary Islands it was pretty hard to get hold of records, so the teenage Pablo had to order them through catalogues. That's when he wasn't busy accompanying his environmental inspector father around the islands by boat to check out the mountains, sand and sea. Or listening to his granny singing in a polyphonic choir and teaching him about folk opera. Or trying to impress girls on the beach with his surfing technique.

El Guincho might be named after a bird from the Canaries that always flies alone, but his music finds finds common ground in the global transfusions of MIA and CSS, the gypsy spirit of Gogol Bordello, the afro beats of Vampire Weekend 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.