Gotan Project
La Revancha del Tango

Talking about Gotan Project means talking about one of the great surprises (to the general public...) that 2001 left us with.
Few would have bet on the success of this Parisian-Argentinian group. Their "La Revancha del Tango" exceeded the most optimistic expectations, to the point that the initially planned 55,000 copies sold out in a very short time all over Europe.

The origins of this group are curious. In 1997, Christophe Müller (beat programming, bass, keyboards), a Swiss transplanted to Paris, and Philippe Cohen Solal (keyboards, bass, sounds & dub fx), already a music supervisor for cinema, formed the Boyz From Brazil.
In this case, as well as for their first "real" album, the name is significant, taking up the title of a film (with Gregory Peck) in which a group of Third Reich veterans, sheltering in Brazil, attempts to create an Aryan race by cloning remnants of the führer's organic tissue. Similarly, the Boyz From Brazil reproduce the peculiarities of Carioca music through electronics, founding their own independent label, Ya Basta!, like a writing by Commander Marcos.

But it is in 1998 that Gotan Project is born, when Cohen Solal and Müller meet Eduardo Makaroff (acoustic guitar), an Argentinian guitarist exiled in Paris, and they found Gotan Project, using that slang play, so familiar in Buenos Aires, which consists of reversing the syllable order within a discourse (Gotan... tango).
The project starts immediately with the release of a 10" single Vuelvo Al Sur which, by coincidence, picks up on the Argentinian sounds of Astor Piazzolla. The second single, Triptico, reworks Gato Barbieri's Ultimo Tango A Parigi. Finally, their latest single is Chunga's Revenge by Frank Zappa.

Since then, only one other piece has come out of the G.T. studio: El Capitalismo Foraneo (an absolute gem of modern-jazz musicianship), a track included in the "Worldwide" compilation curated by Gilles Peterson, published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Talkin’ Loud, the historic English label that launched acid jazz and published some of those sound experiments that can be considered a sort of passport to the third millennium.

But finally, their long-awaited album is out, and the wait was not in vain. The 10 pieces are a true apotheosis of modern electronic sound reworked in a jazz key, where only St.Germain had dared, combined with the use of nervous accordions and Argentinian-inspired sounds.

A must-have album, now become a cult object, to the point that concerts around Italy (not surprisingly, the Tenax in Florence did not let them slip away...) have all sold out. And indeed, sales have gone excellently, hand in hand with the works of St-Germain and Llorca, demonstrating that in France, but especially in Paris, they know how to make music.