Diamin and F.A.N.G.O. on shared musical landscapes to create a new label,Tecnologías Elementales.
19-05-2022
Interview by Sophie Kübler
Edit: Iberia Muñoz
Images by Diamin & Tecnologías Elementales
The two friends know each other from the electronic music scene in Buenos Aires. Diamin, who is from Chile, moved to Buenos Aires and immersed herself in the nightlife where she met F.A.N.G.O.
F.A.N.G.O., a data scientist, and Diamin, an environmental scientist by day, found many points of intersection between them, which they later discussed and exchanged in nerdy online conversations. They consolidated their friendship but also a deep connection through constant learning and enthusiasm for music, aesthetics and parties. This is how the infamous party series Family Affair was born in 2014. Self-defined as an “intimate space for exchange and encounters, an invitation to listening and dancing without prejudices or gender limitations”, Family Affair has taken an important and formative place in the scene.
Diamin, a resident at the Tbilisi Radio Mutant Radio, has also played a set for Boiler Room and our CIRCA radio show series on Rinse France. Her numerous DJ sets are constellations of the artistic vision and language she has curated in conjunction with her work as an environmental scientist. The artist has recently moved to Berlin to find new intersections in her work and continue the work the two have envisioned for the label.
Ezequiel Fanego aka F.A.N.G.O., as a catalyst of electronic music culture in Buenos Aires, has been digging for years into obscure electronic music experimental and dance oriented at the same time. He is the Creative Director of Caja Negra editorial, a platform that, for more than 15 years, has focused on developing a repertoire of critical resources to intervene in the structures of the present and multiply the uncertain future.
Working hand in hand, each Diamin and F.A.N.G.O. took their shared landscapes and backgrounds and created the label Tecnologías Elementales this year. In their opening statement they give shape to their identity: “We look for traces of a continuum that links past, present and future. We identify with the metamorphosis, the information flows and the most unexpected deviations.”
Inspired by an almost "perfectionist passion for music, compositional knowledge, and the treatment of sound that cause emotional effects" the label’s first release Mutualismos 01 brought in Kamila Govorčin and Qik. These are two artists with two musical sides that introduced the label's ethos: the dissemination of sound messages strictly selected and oriented towards the intervention of the global nervous system.
This venture has not only created a new platform but also a space where they can play with old and new ideas. Diamin in Berlin and F.A.N.G.O in Argentina, the duo realized they were interested in everything that expressed personal search. Tecnologías Elementales is a label that organizes its own music, its own style, its own DNA which is currently taking form. Seeing music as a technology itself, Diamin and F.A.N.G.O. promote cooperativity. “We seek to promote local knowledge,” they state.
Bound by constant learning and curiosity, Mutualismo 01 is only the beginning of a new venture. "The collective experiment of cultural production has nurtured our personal development as artists while connecting us with many people who share our aesthetic sensibility.”
“We envision it (Tecnologías Elementales) as creating our own sound bank."
They don't reveal all the details about the next release, but they do reveal that there will be a second series that will be more about concept albums. In order to invite people into their sound world, which also includes visual aspects, Technologías Elementals opens up a community that includes an arc between visual and auditory creation from a context of their own.
Which is a pretty cool platform), so you both have interconnections and also your own projects. How do these play into Technologías Elementales and working on the style and idea behind it You are pretty best friends and you also work together at Family Affairs (the party series in Buenos Aires). Diamin you are from Santiago de Chile and F.a.n.g.o. you are from Buenos Aires, Argentina. First of all, I would like to know how you became friends and what connects you so much to start a label together?
FANGO: As you can imagine, we became friends through music. Our first contact was online, we started chatting thanks to a post that one of us had made of a DJ Sprinkles’ track. A week later we were sharing a booth at our first party djing together, and we never stopped from there.
DIAMIN: This must have been over 10 years ago when I had recently moved to Buenos Aires. Now that I remember, that interaction had as a prequel a Facebook event organized by Fango’s publishing house, Caja Negra. It was a party that he organized to launch Peter Shapiro's book Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. That was the first time I heard about him. I also remember that we had a virtual feedback exchange with lots of nerdy information.
FANGO: The next step was to walk together a process of improvement in our profession, but almost as if it were a game. A very serious game that we play together: sharing records, information, learning techniques, getting better and better. So probably what connects us so much has to do with that: a process of constant learning and curiosity.
DIAMIN: On the other hand, both the origin of our friendship and of the label have something to do in a certain way to my migration to and from Buenos Aires. Our friendship grew and developed due to the fact that we got to know and re-discover each other in that city during the years that I was living there. And as we began to face the fact that it was time for me to go to another place, the label project also emerged as a strategy to keep us interconnected.
Diamin, you’ve been living in Berlin since last year, right? How has that influenced your musical style and idea of music so far? How does this relate to your earlier, material both in Familiy Affair but also in your own projects in your careers? Fango, you are also curator of Casa Negra Editora, a platform dedicated since „more than 15 years dedicated to developing a repertoire of critical resources to interfere with the structures of the present and multiply uncertain futures“ (Which is a pretty cool platform), so you both have interconnections and also your own projects. How do these play into Technologías Elementales and working on the style and idea behind it?
DIAMIN: Doing a bit of personal retrospective, I have always been, and I hope to continue to be, a migrant person. And these processes of living in different cities have been planned in advance but at the same time they developed in a natural way. In this sense, currently living in Berlin is the materialization of an idea that had been in my mind for a very long time. So, being used to this, I could not say that recently moving to Berlin has affected my musical influences, my style and/or sound search. I consider that this does not respond so much to external inputs, but rather to something that is fluttering inside oneself. At least that's how I feel. But what moving here and also touring before the pandemic did for me is that it opened up professional possibilities by connecting with lots of artists with similar approaches.
FANGO: Indeed, Tecnologías Elementales is a project that feeds on different facets of our personalities. In addition to our musical convergence, we each bring varied elements from our experiences and field of interests. Diamin, for example, studied environmental science and that is very present on our project. And as you say, I have extensive experience in the publishing field, since I have been publishing counter cultural and critical literature for many years, and that is also reflected in our label in multiple ways. Partly because we also see it as a project that is not only aesthetic but also countercultural. Tecnologías Elementales has a message, which is going to grow and develop through the music, the design, the liner notes, through many audiovisual interventions that we plan to do and mostly to our work with friends and artists.
What do you look for when curating the label and the artists you want to collaborate with?
TECNOLOGÍAS ELEMENTALES: We didn't know about this at the beginning, but as we started looking for artists we realized that we were interested in everything that expressed a personal search. Some uncertainty and self-discovery. We believe that there are many certainties lately when it comes to music, everything seems easily cataloged, everything can be very easily entered in the algorithmic search. Almost as if the search engines' own ranking criteria were determining creativity. Everything that makes us question what we do attracts our attention.
Mutualismos 01 is a series, as you describe it. The description says, "Organisms interact in three fundamental ways: competition, predation, and mutualism." What is the series about and what can you say about the cooperation between all the "organisms" in this process? And why a series?
FANGO: As DJs we always loved the EP split format: one artist on each side resembles the two sides of a coin, even the sides of the moon. You can have two very different artists but when you put them together similarities begin to emerge (a similar thing can happen on a DJ mix for example). Luckily, through the light of one artist you begin to see facets of the other that you had not previously perceived. So we are interested in that kind of cooperation that can arise through our curatorial work and also we like the idea of this cooperation to be international: to use this series to make people from different parts of the world connect. So that is also why we wanted it to be a series, because we pretend to continue working with this idea.
DIAMIN: The idea of defining a series within the label is also a tribute to a time when record labels used to sub-categorize their publications depending, for example, on whether they were more dance or ambient oriented. We really like when this happens, when the labels build their own criteria to organize their music, something that we feel is being lost due to the contemporary strategies for publishing.
Also, one main reason for us to plan to organize our catalog through series is linked to the name of the label. And to the fact that we consider music as a kind of technology in itself, which depending on its characteristics can be applied to favor certain processes. In the case of Mutualismos, we approach music as a technology that promotes cooperativity. These different approaches will become clearer when we announce our second release, which will be part of a second series, more oriented to full conceptual albums.
Mutualism ... „Is defined as an interaction between species that is beneficial to both.“ What about the themes you work with that are also special on the first release? I have the impression that it is a combination of culture, human condition and biology (in terms of the label, as the name suggests: Technologies Elementales).
FANGO: Yes, as we told you before, Tecnologías Elementales is the product of the encounter between our different interests and backgrounds. Prior to the conception of the label, for example, Diamin and I were discussing a lot about the common roots that share cybernetics and ecology. Both fields of thought tend to interpret the interaction between different systems in search of balance. Modern and Western thought tends to strictly distinguish between culture and nature, but this distinction is merely analytical since there are lots of similarities between human behavior and the behavior of minerals, the weather or machines. The same happens with another modern distinction that is at the core of our lineal and progressive conception of time. Past, present and future is a simplification that we made to give an order to the chaos surrounding us, but things are more complex than that. Tecnologías Elementales also express a non-linear conception of time, even a quantum time, a superposition of states where past, present and future merge. So we want to play with these ideas that we have, and that always come back again and again in our late night conversations.
What can you tell us about Qik and Kamila Govorčin that inspired you to release both of their works as the premiered piece?
TECNOLOGÍAS ELEMENTALES: We have known both Qik and Kamila for a long time, and they have been producing music since then. Among other aspects, they both share an almost perfectionist passion for music, which leads them to explore not only its compositional aspect, but also issues related to the treatment of sound and the relationship between that treatment and the emotional effects it causes. As we see it, they are both at a very high point in this search and in the tracks that we decided to publish this is clear. Also, we liked the idea to start our label with artists from our homeland that we know very well.
How does it feel to work in a label about the themes, creative ideas and visions? How much does your background and local scene and network in Latin America play into pushing music and artists forward? Is that part of your vision?
TECNOLOGÍAS ELEMENTALES: We are not interested in Tecnologías Elementales to be label exclusive for Latin American artists, since one of our main focus is to build bridges between different geographical contexts and experiences through musical production. But, of course, we are deeply informed by our cultural heritage and our local scene, and we will channel that into this project. Our way of doing, our way of approaching music, dance, friendships, has its main root in a localized experience, and we would like the label to work as a bridge that allows communication between Latin America and other latitudes, favoring the exchange between artists as well.
You (both) have become a more explorative force in the last few years, what were the main development points for you in starting Technologías Elementales?
TECNOLOGÍAS ELEMENTALES: Throughout our history as friends, partners and sonic adventurers, we have always been on a path of gradual evolution. Where each emerging project was correlated with the previous one, organically. Family Affair for example, a DJ and collectors collective that we founded in Argentina with another friend of ours, Finger Blas, mutated a lot over the years: from all nightlong parties to daytime events oriented towards experimental listening, through fanzines and vinyl fairs to even a radio show. This collective experience of cultural production nourished our personal evolution as artists, and at the same time it connected us with many people who shared our aesthetic sensibility. Receiving positive feedback regarding our personal searches gave us the urge to explore different ways of transmitting information with others. With Tecnologías Elementales, our craftship changed from research to curatorial, instead of sharing with others what we recollected through hours of digging we started producing our own content in the context of our own label. We think of this as an opportunity to create our own sound bank, to develop ourselves along with the artists of our label, those sounds that we were looking for out there.
Who is responsible for the artwork of the label? How important is the vibe and style in the artwork important to the label?
TECNOLOGÍAS ELEMENTALES: When we were in search of our visual identity, destiny (or the silent operation of elemental technologies) wanted us to cross paths with Mark Angelo, a visual artist whose work we had admired for a long time. Mark Angelo has been heavily involved in the UK rave scene since 1990 and is one of the founding members of Spiral Tribe. For our logo, Mark managed to synthesize a language system that integrates some concepts that may seem contradictory, but we want to think about them together: technology/nature, digital/analogue, future/past, virtual/real, organic/synthetic, science/magic. A language for both human and non-human intelligence, which is the language of every elemental technology that we use for inner knowledge, cosmic traveling or communal experiences.
So we worked with Mark to conceive our logo, and then with a design studio that we love and recommend very much: Lamas Burgariotti. They focus on typography, art direction, editorial design as well as the creation of art pieces and installations. Each piece of communication for Tecnologías Elementales, such as the graphic design of our first releases and our social networks, is the product of careful work that they developed, linking textures, typography and graphic elements in a coherent and constantly changing system.
Of course, we consider that the visual aspect of a label is a core element of its profile. Among all things, what we do is to communicate. We introduce people to sonic worlds. And sonic worlds do have visual aspects. Even if a label decides to refrain from having any kind of graphic treatment, that decision already constitutes a visual statement, a graphic atmosphere for the music to proliferate.
What are your plans for the future? What themes do you want to work on and with which artists?
DIAMIN: Our most immediate plans have to do with disseminating Mutualismos 01 and the birth of the label, pending the release of the second album. F.A.N.G.O. will be in Europe for a couple of months soon so we will be together to make some noise. We don't want to say much about this second album for now, just comment that it will be part of a second series, aimed at deepening the sound and conceptual worlds of certain artists that we are interested in. To start with that second series we are going to work with a very mythical chapter from the argentine electronic underground. A musical entity that has long been manufacturing a type of elemental technology oriented to ritual trance and astral traveling.
Mutualismo 01, TE 001 is now available on vinyl via deejay.com
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