VIERNES CULTURAL

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The Argentine pop theorist in the form of a mashup king, Villa Diamante, has just released Empacho Digital (digital bellyache), a “3-disc mashup album”. Of course it isn’t available on disc – one can only download it. He says:

This is just another one of the tireless efforts of making art out of art, with cultural industries at their height, record companies at their worst moments, and the Web functioning as the maximum tool for informational searches, the freedom of Wi-Fi is already showing its first collateral damages.

Here’s a tune from “disc 2”, Dubsteperismo, Spanish-language vocals atop wubstep.

[audio:02-VillaDiamante-DonaMariavsItalTek.mp3]

Villa Diamante – Doña María vs Ital Tek

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Three years before, Dutchman Dick El Demasiado was in Buenos Aires, making edits of old cumbias.

He called this song “Sabado Cultural”, although his album doesn’t mention the band he is obviously chopping up and sampling, Julieta con los Nuñez. As if they didn’t exist. Remix as reinscription, a more complete kind of erasure – but then there are always folks spotting the source samples. Identifying where the sounds came from transforms the sample from an (anonymous) point into a lineage, in process offering us a chance to listen to the old music that got folded into the new (or the new music that got folded into the new, like when Burial sampled recent songs by Christina Aguilera, David Lynch, and Beyonce).

I especially like hiphop album sample-source compilations — for example the (bootleg) collection of all the original tunes used on J Dilla’s Donuts. A unique window into musical transformation. A fascinating form of bibliography… or memory. DJs as weird historians, accidentally finding themselves in that position after years of ‘just’ looking for music. Julieta seems to have been forgotten except for “Viernes Cultural”, whose memory Dick both effaces and extends.

First, the original:

[audio:Julieta_con_los_Nunez_VIERNES_CULTURAL.MP3]

Julieta con los Nuñez – Viernes Cultural (also called Cumbia de las Sandalias)

then Dick’s “lunatic” edit (his word not mine), renamed here

[audio:Julieta_con_los_Nunez_VIERNES_CULTURAL-Dick_el_Demasiado-remix.mp3]

Julieta con los Nuñez – Viernes Cultural (Dick el Demasaido remix)

12 thoughts on “VIERNES CULTURAL”

  1. what’s interesting — and great — to me about villa diamante’s approach is the use of samples, of mashup logic, to do precisely the opposite that dick el demasiado intended: to hail an audience abroad (and around the corner) via recognizable source material. ghislain employed this strategy too with the bounce le remix series. and plenty of club musics are pretty much driven by a constant effort to fold the latest and greatest into its own aesthetic realm. (see, e.g., juke, bmore) like gavin said:

    Juke is a genre that stays visible by constantly offering remixes of the latest popular hits, so I wouldn’t call juketon a trend or anything like that (the next track gives a similar treatment to “Ayo Technology”).

    ¡viva la remix!

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  3. wow… it’s obvious now, but I never twigged that the DelD track was a remix. Cheers for exposing us to the original – hearing it sparks off that great Deja Vu feeling that fuelled my Prodigy sample-source mix… http://postbocks.com/uploads/huskiii_what_sample_lurks … Sometimes it diminishes the song and sometimes enhances it. Jury’s out on Sabado Cultural.

  5. sometimes mashups seem about things that fit perfectly- effectively rewriting our memory of the original vs the remix- i think you went off on this regarding Leifs Burial remix and Martinez paper planes cumbia refix- Diamante seems to be going for discordance or confusion as much as anything – check the Nelly remix for my primary example. His lady tigra mash just found a spot on my new mix though….

  6. Hello Jace,
    thanks for posing the subject and exposing the material, and even more, the name of the original singer.
    And i hope many people enjoy both versions without competition.
    You close the note with a very nice, bittersweet and acid sentence , it’s poetry and depicts very precisely the situation. We are living all these phenomena and need to live with it in elegance.
    Viernes Cultural or Sabado cultural, we are talking history.
    The song was part of the book with a cd “La Lenta Pero Incesante Degradacion de las Cumbias Lunaticas” (made in 2000), a (real) book and cd on which Radio Nacional de Argentina spent several hours of National Argentinian radio in 2002.
    Please listen (link hereunder) to one of those delirious hours of radio-journalist Pancho Muñoz and you will find Sabado Cultural at the 18th minute… where it is attributed to Hygienica Gonzalez (a A.K.A.). All text and soundtracks from this mentioned bundle are one way or the other by me and …. (another AKA)….by Ariel Goldsinger.
    the link of the radioprogram is:
    http://www.canalcumex.com/radio_casi_peninsula.html
    for your orientation in the link: each boat around the Malvinas represents a radioprogram, but the one you should hear is the boat that when you scroll over will say: LA DESFAROLADA PANCHERA… (the program is Faro, the maker Pancho).
    the link for the book, in Spanish, is:
    http://www.periferico.org/ibwww/texten/lalenta/index.html
    sorry it is not a downloadable pdf

    Could you tell me where you read the song dates from 3 years ago ?
    I am glad to supply you personally with exact data, for instance about my 5 cd’s full of songs out in Argentina , or the Festicumex.

    un sincero sin cero,
    Dick El Demasiado
    Buenos Aires – Eindhoven

  7. thanks for joining conversation, Dick. I got “Sabado Cultural” from your ‘Sin Pues Nada’ CD, released in 2006 on Tomenota Records.

    Liner notes make no mention of an earlier release elsewhere.

  8. Huskiii: Prodigy mix much appreciated! Casanova, your playing days are over! 🙂

    Jace: Why don’t you tell it like it is – Dick is a dick for not naming the original artist on a track that is almost entirely built from 1 song by Julieta con los Nuñez.

    Revolutionarys and criminals, can you tell them apart.

  9. thanks to everybody for this interesting debate. I agree: sampling is memory, is another way to make and remake history. for people who live in not so sampled cultural areas – I live in the basque country/ near spain- its funny because we have a big heritage to sample and reeedit.

    I invite you to listen my ambient-hiphop session and guess where the loops come from. best wishes to all. dj ura

    dj ura the mint session:

    http://www.archive.org/details/MENDABELARRA

  10. i think u should always give credit to those from who you sample, but as a digger, sample-discovering is always a pleasure, so it would be less fun if u always know it… and that moment when u’re djing a sampled tune that is way better than the original and everybody goes crazy is like waaaaaaaa!!!

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