Jack in the BumBumBox

Ay Ay Ay is not, strictly speaking, a techno record. And neither is Matias Aguayo, strictly speaking, a techno producer. If we take that to be fait accompli, then it’s still remarkable that his sophomore album just so happened to have been released by Kompakt, one of Europe’s foremost techno imprints. But Ay Ay Ay goes further than being an outlier; it’s a rebellious, even antagonistic statement, when taking into account both the context of its emergence, and developments surrounding its release last year – namely, BumBumBox. But first thing’s first.

Matias Aguayo’s follow up to his 2005 debut, Are You Really Lost, wasn't so much a ‘progression’ as it was a metamorphosis. But more than that, Ay Ay Ay was fundamentally contrarian. Minimal and Walter Neff, two singles released in 2008, were supposed to preface Aguayo’s imminent foray into a clearly defined techno-pop crossover record. In retrospect, they instead signalled the flickering embers of what he was leaving behind, something that was increasingly evident by the time of the release of Minimal, a mocking reproach against the eponymous techno substrate for having “no groove” and “no balls”. I ask him, on the rather tenuous pretext of Kompakt figurehead Michael Mayer’s recently released Immer 3, if he plans to record anything further with Dirk Leyers (the other half of seminal Kompakt duo Closer Musik), to which he responds with a curt “no”. It’s hard to shake the notion that he feels thoroughly estranged from the genre.

“Oh I still love techno music, but [I think] techno music must be "crazy" or "freaky" and nowadays it seems more like custom made professional productions by very professional producers doing their professional music production in very professional studios that look like offices with speakers. Sometimes I can sense some techno 'spirit' in any music, like being unpredictable, using technology against the way it was thought to be used, or in knowledge about the relationship between body and music. I love techno, but well, it is always a struggle of meanings and definition what you understand as being ‘techno’”.

Ay Ay Ay’s “intuitive and joyful” nature, as Aguayo himself describes it, seems then to be the culmination of a desire for escape; Aguayo is unequivocal about what he’s escaping from, but of more interest is the nature of Aguayo’s bid for artistic freedom: the now-famed BumBumBox parties. Having helped curate the BumBumBox parties, or BBB for short – free street parties that had originated in Buenos Aires, and subsequently spread across other major cities in South America – Aguayo has slowly exported BBB to Europe, something he hopes will precipitate a more inclusive, liberated and spontaneous strain of club culture.

“Practically everything is more crazy than in a club on a BBB. In a club, you won't meet old or underaged people, nor will some bikers suddenly appear and join the party, doing spontaneously the lights for the dancefloor from their bikes. Also it is very unlikely you will meet people in a club that don't know what they are listening to, and music-wise obviously it is much more free and freaky than what you can hear in a club. Furthermore there is not a customer/service offerer relationship between audience and performer, it is all much more mixed up, participation is important, and you will never ever hear somebody complaining about the music or asking for a song, as it is free and it is a present.”

Somewhat implicitly, Aguayo raises the issue of the corporatisation of the contemporary club experience, and he has previous on the related and seldom discussed issue of ethno-tourism in dance music. Having already been outspoken on what he sees as a phenomenon of “cultural colonialism” by European dance producers – in its crudest form, the cutting-and-pasting of latin-lite rhythms onto generic techno templates (the combination of which, in another interview, he had asserted was in “very bad taste”) – he elaborates further: “You give your European music some “exotic" touch, [but] in the end it's only Latino and African clichés not too far from Disney's ‘Lion King’ or the ‘Waka Waka’ song from the World Cup.” He does, however, preface this by saying (in a rather opaque way) that: “Many musical achievements come from a combination of different influences and also often ‘misunderstood’ influences.”

Citing cumbia as one of his many indirect influences (“I listen a lot to it and have a huge collection, especially of the original, Colombian Cumbia...I don't try to do cumbia...but obviously if you listen to something so much it will obviously be somehow reflected in your music,”) Aguayo’s sound nowadays is heavily informed by fragments of South American subgenres, layered with playful and often sensual sing-along hooks and stripped down beatboxing riffs, a combination that he doesn’t always find easy to bring to fruition when DJing, as he explains when asked about the full band setup he is introducing into his live shows.

“Doing the band is really something that starts from my DJ sets...it’s really an extension to my DJ sets, or something like a next step for me. I sing and play a couple of instruments, and sometimes it is too much for just two hands to hold a mic, mix the CDs and play some percussion, so I invited my fellow musicians Diego Morales aka Diegors and Vicente Sanfuentes to participate and develop this idea further, to play the rhythms with me and sing along."

Given that Aguayo’s focus is now firmly on Cómeme – a new label co-founded with Gary Pimiento – it seems that his relationship with Kompakt, while not exactly over, seems on an indefinite hiatus. “I don’t really feel like belonging to an aesthetic there, and if there is something like that I obviously see it more reflected in my [current] label.” It seems, sadly, that the end of the affair is imminent.