Matias Aguayo: Artist You Should Know

After a few years hiatus, Chile’s cheeky clown prince of electronic music Matias Aguayo has returned with a follow-up to 2009’s phenomenal and perplexingly wonderful “Ay Ay Ay”.

In keeping with his everything and the kitchen-sink approach, Aguayo’s new work “The Visitor”flits, buzzes and whirs like a robot bumblebee…wearing worker boots.

Although the high end of the mix is always very playful organized chaos, the low end is an always consistent rhythmic base which is rooted in a combination of more traditional Latin music rhythms and their myriad post-millenial offshoots.

But in spirit Aguayo is perhaps paying homage to the Chilean cuecatradition, a musical style where “neither the words nor the music obey any fixed rules; various motives are freely intermingled,” according to Chilean composer, Pedro Humberto Allende. At times singing in Spanish, other times English, at times playing with the sound of a single consonant, telling the love story of a shrimp, or creating a slow house chugger about how cold a particular beach is, Aguayo is seemingly bound by nothing and crafts music that sounds like it.

Calling on a cast of extremely talented Comemeartists like Daniel Maloso, Philipp Gorbachev, Ana Helder, Alejandro Paz and Vicente Sanfuentes, Aguayo crafted one of this (or any year’s) most excellent and boundary shifting albums.

“The Visitor” is another spectacularly weird stunner.