Since the turn of the millennium, Buenos Aires has emerged as a major centre of electronic dance music in Latin America. As well as constituting an important regional hub for international EDM, it has also been at the heart of the creation of new styles that reinvent traditional Latin American genres with the aid of digital technology and aesthetics – first electro-tango and, more recently, digital cumbia and digital folklore. Argentinean laptop artist-producers have mixed a range of Latin American and Caribbean popular and folk musics with electronic musics like techno, dub, dubstep, and dancehall to create new hybrid styles. Digital cumbia was propelled to the global stage by a number of producers across Latin America, and among the main driving forces was the Buenos Aires record label ZZK Records. Founded by Grant C. Dull (aka El G), Diego Bulacio (aka Villa Diamante), and Guillermo Canale (aka DJ Nim), ZZK began life in 2006 as a weekly party, Zizek Urban Beats Club, which grouped together laptop artists interested in experimenting with cumbia and other Latin American genres, and it coalesced into a label in 2008.
Recognized by music journalists, bloggers and DJs around the world as a key creative centre in contemporary Latin American electronic music, ZZK Records became the central pillar of my research. The label was noteworthy because of its role in organizing, defining and promoting a localized Buenos Aires music scene, its foregrounding of digital technology at the level of both musical aesthetics and institutional self-presentation, and its particularly transnational twist. ZZK’s day-to-day director, Grant C. Dull, is North American, and the label’s artists look to overseas audiences, touring regularly to Europe and the U.S. The transnational aspect of the label only increased in prominence in 2011-12, as it signed deals with U.S. label Waxploitation and London-based Kartel Music Management. My research also extended beyond ZZK to include DJ/producers like DJ Taz, a foundational figure in the fusion of cumbia and electronic music, and his ‘disciples’ Negro Dub, Che Cumbé, and Hijo de la Cumbia, who have been making experimental dub cumbia for a number of years, though in a different geographical and social orbit than ZZK (the peripheral Zona Norte rather than the central Palermo district). During 2011, laptop cumbia also became established in the commercial cumbia scene, thanks to pioneers like Macho y El Rey and the huge success of Los Wachiturros. JR Producciones and DJ Krass, a key production company and producer working with this new genre, sometimes known as música turra, opened a door for me into this unstudied area. Finally, I spent a month in Colombia, mainly in Bogotá and Medellín, investigating related musical developments in the new Colombian music scene.
At present, my research consists of four principal axes.
– First, I am exploring the rise of what I am tentatively calling a ‘post-digital ethos’ in the middle-class cumbia scene, as laptop DJ/producers are shifting towards more acoustic and live band formats, displacing the laptop from centre stage, and digital cumbia has been somewhat overtaken by a new wave of large retro cumbia orchestras.
– Second, I am considering and contextualizing ZZK Records as a case study of the opportunities and challenges facing the independent music industry in Buenos Aires in the digital age.
– Third, I am focusing on the subject of intellectual property, and analysing the tensions between efforts to harmonise with the copyright norms and institutions of the global North, resistance to such harmonisation from the global South, and the spread of alternative ideologies such as ‘free culture’ in Latin America.
– Fourth, I am examining digital cumbia as a transnational ‘culture of circulation’ (Lee and LiPuma 2002) through the lens of a single song, Mati Zundel’s ‘El Alto de La Paz’.
