Matias Aguayo returns with The Visitor

“You're talking to me about ‘pushing boundaries,’ but this is flawed because it implies an artist has to be very searching or burdened,” says Matias Aguayo by phone from France, where he's visiting friends. “I think it's the opposite. It's very hard to replicate well what has gone before. Looking forward should be easy.”

The prism of retrospection that seems to tower over much 21st century music and art has never shadowed Matias Aguayo. The Visitor, the Chilean producer's third LP and his first through own label Cómeme, is a record that takes influence from place rather than time, and from individuals over stylistic movements; the Latin sensibilities of its tonally chameleonic, rhythmic core have more to do with inherent heritage than with any actively pursued touchstones.

The Visitor was the first record to be finished at and, he says, “has the feel” of The District Union, the new studio that he's set up in Berlin. Its assembled parts, however, were sourced globally, gathered over a month of recording native percussionists in Rionegro, Colombia, spending time in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Paris, and working with German electronic veteran Gudrun Gut at her rural studio, Sternhagen Gut. In addition to featuring plenty of Cómeme's roster, including Philipp Gorbachev and Alejandro Paz, The Visitor boasts a multilingual, poly-directional range of collaborators, from Chilean 80s new wave figurehead Jorge González of Los Prisioneros to Juliana Gattas, singer in Argentinian electro-pop mainstays Miranda! “It's fun and it's a challenge,” Aguayo says of his co-operative way of working. “Making music becomes about opening up a dialogue with others.”

This dialogue can feel quite literal: vocals are important to Aguayo, and the diversity and delivery of language are key in maintaining The Visitor's continual timbral flux. As he describes it, “it's a game of different accents. As people we develop very sophisticated melody compositions, intonations and, indeed, rhythms in our everyday speech. I wanted to try and apply that to the music.”

The funnelling of such a multitude of recorded samples, studio tracks and other collaged elements into what amounts to a crisp, propulsive listen full of flavour and surprise proves that Aguayo, as well as acting as curator in choosing his working partners, is also a diligent editor, his maximalist creative approach offset by his precision in cutting and refining. “I like to leave the creative process as free as possible,” he explains. “There's a risk of being too controlled – and making music is fun for me! I don't want to put a criteria on that. I wait and go over the results at the end.”

Aguayo's singular, freeform philosophies have always left a mark, from his work in Cologne as Zimt and Closer Musik – with Michael Mayer and Dirk Leyers respectively – to his previous solo albums, 2005's Are You Really Lost and 2009's Ay Ay Ay, and other collaborations, including guesting on Battles' succulently sweet Ice Cream. There's a confidence in his canon that derives from a near-lifetime of thinking alternatively, in part thanks to having experienced the all-too typical attitudes of backwater mindsets confronted with someone ‘different.’ “I moved from Chile to Germany and lived provincially from a young age,” he comments. “I was considered a freak, but I just learned early on not to care what people thought of me."

His music's inclusivity, however, also comes from his maturity as a person and an artist; he no longer sees any point in dividing lines. “I've been making music too long to see myself as part of a cultural discussion where I say, ‘no, I reject what's happening here,’” he states. “I don't relate to that anymore.”