Matías Aguayo is not an easy man to pigeonhole, and over the course of a long conversation by video call while on tour in Porto, it becomes clear that he rather likes it that way.
Born in Chile, raised in Germany and with previous stints living in Berlin, Paris and Buenos Aires, his body of work is equally eclectic. He is a DJ, producer, singer, musician, and the founder of the wonderfully uncategorisable label Cómeme – home of artists as diverse as Barnt, Djs Pareda, Lena Willikens, Philipp Gorbachev, and Aguayo himself – of which more later.
Aguayo’s magpie tendencies come to the fore on his new album Anenoa, released at the end of May on the Serendeepity label. It’s a kaleidoscopic explosion of uptempo Latin rhythms, singalong refrains in Spanish and English, sophisticated synth-pop and more, with a multinational cast of collaborators including Rafael Cohen of !!!, Etienne Jaumet of Zombie-Zombie, and Angel Deradoorian (ex-Dirty Projectors).
First, though, that title – who or what is Anenoa?
According to Aguayo, it’s “a fantasy word” that he came up with to encapsulate the idea of music filled with hope for a world after fascism and war. But once he did a little digging, he found that it already exists in two disparate and geographically remote languages.
“One is in the Indian Ocean, in Madagascar, and then on the other side, in the Pacific Ocean, it’s a Māori word,” he explains. “In the Māori context, anenoa is the concept of listening, of letting sounds enter your ears, and in Malagasy [the native language of Madagascar], it means right now – this very moment that we are living.”
It’s oddly fitting for an album that tackles important themes in Aguayo’s own idiosyncratic way. Meanwhile, the striking artwork features a graphical representation of a volcano, neatly tying the two locations together:
“These [Madagascar and New Zealand] are two volcanic places, and for me [Anenoa] sounds almost like a fantasy volcano somewhere. I found it was a good place to put together what this album is about, feeling-wise and content-wise.
“It’s this idea of working in a free-spirited mind towards better possibilities, a better future, and not being too constrained in different ideas of genres that we are led to work within, especially in this algorithmic world of today.”
The music of Matías Aguayo has always been colourful, playful and fun – never more so than on Anenoa – while Aguayo himself is a deep thinker whose art is profoundly influenced by the world around him. He sees no contradiction in that, believing that art has its role to play in troubling times.
“We are in this dystopic present, and I imagine that the counterculture should answer that, and not just reflect it, as is happening a lot in music today,” he says. “As Lucrecia Martel, the filmmaker from Argentina, says, if all the dystopias have become true, it’s because they were imagined beforehand. And if we want to imagine a better future, we all as artists have to contribute a more positive vision.
“There’s also a weird contradiction of being in this moment of history in the world and at the same time wanting to create, which I think is necessary because it’s not really escapism, I think it’s also something that gives us the strength to resist and imagine other possibilities in these times.”
There’s nothing grandstanding or didactic about Aguayo’s form of art as resistance – simply expressing joy can play an important role, he argues. Take the album’s lead single, Sentimientos Encontraos [in English, ‘mixed feelings’], and its infectious playground chant set to a breathless 150+bpm merengue groove.
“I always test songs in parties, and this song was very much born in the context of the Nueva Red de Bailadores parties, these free block parties in Mexico City where I have been participating because I’ve always been searching for interaction in public space and diverse communities,” Aguayo explains.
The song is accompanied by a suitably irreverent, joyful video, featuring Aguayo in a split-screen dance battle with dancer Giselle Elias on the streets of Mexico City as they try to evade the clutches of a comically shady-looking female detective.
“The lyrics are very silly, it’s about this girl who has these mixed feelings that are running around in chaos and anxiety, but this anxiety turns into a rhythm,” he says. “So it’s kind of a life hack that this everyday anxiety in what is called late capitalism or something is suddenly turned into a groove with these very silly or funny or repetitive catchphrases.
“All these things for me are important because if we want to resist, we need to have life force, and I think dance music can give that.”
Another highlight from the album, The Beat, is an ode to rhythm based on a punk-funk bassline, a shuffling groove, and just about every percussive sound you can imagine, each introduced by Aguayo on the mic – “the hi-hat, the toms, the cowbell, the rim, the beat,” he intones.
In the video, Aguayo plays the role of a funky music teacher, with a class of puppets – from the Chilean children’s TV show 31 Minutos – as his students. “It’s a little bit like an educational dance track,” he says, “so for me The Beat is a tribute to the idea of free public education and the naïvety and joyfulness of these things. I always think of The Beat as a song for children but that adults also can enjoy.”
This sense of playfulness is a constant theme in Aguayo’s music, his hybrid live performances where he steps down from the stage to sing and dance in the crowd, and even the bold, colourful artwork that adorned the sleeves of his label, Comeme. In his view, there’s a direct line from his unusual upbringing to this unpredictable creativity.
“Growing up in a Latino household in Germany is quite weird,” he says. “I lived in many different places and I also lived in small towns where you would be kind of the outcast or the awkward one, and that helped me to develop, I think, my own language.
“When I was a kid, very early, I would experiment with recording on my tape recorder at home. I was living with my parents in some small town outside of Cologne, and there was not so much access to alternative music or information. There were some radio programmes that you could listen to very late at night, but one had to very much invent yourself.
“This led me very fast, I think, to develop my own sounds and my own style, and also not to care so much about what other people think of you, because there was no niche anyway where one would fit in.
“I think that this can be the advantage for smalltown boys – not fitting in and having to create your own persona.”
Aguayo moved to Mexico during the pandemic – he was on tour in Ecuador when it hit and decided against going home to Berlin when he had the option of staying in Latin America. He chose Mexico simply because he had friends there who could put him up.
Six years later, he’s still there, and the sounds, rhythms and language he’s been surrounded with in that time have clearly informed Anenoa.
“I was thinking at the time that it would be a short thing, but it was not that short,” he says. “At some point I got residency, and then I realised, okay, I’m now really officially living here.
“Also, for us artists, as for many other people now, the time after the pandemic had very much to do with rescuing your own career or rebuilding it or whatever, because everything had changed afterwards. Many of the places one would play before didn’t exist anymore. Many clubs, many of the promoters had changed jobs, went to other places.
“And also, everything became much more commercial and much more Euro-trashy sound-wise, and so suddenly we found ourselves in a world where we had to recreate ourselves or regenerate ourselves, which was for me not so easy. But it worked out, in a way.
“The connection to Latin America helped me and I could put much more focus on it, and so this part of the Atlantic became naturally much more the centre of my operations.
“Obviously it has a deep influence on the album, because I’m speaking Spanish every day, I’m participating at these parties that I mentioned to you, and I regularly go down to Argentina and to Chile and Colombia, at least two times a year, and even the US, where I also play a lot, but where you have a lot of a Latino audience.
“Songs like Sentimientos Encontrados, it’s very unlikely that I would have written them while living day-to-day life in Berlin.”
But what of Cómeme? Fans of the label will have noticed that releases have slowed to a stop in recent years – has that chapter closed?
“It is quiet at the moment because I think there are some crucial elements missing for me to make it attractive and viable,” he explains. “I think labels don’t work anymore as they did before. We seem to emulate or imitate a system that we know is not working anymore but because we don’t know anything else, we just keep repeating the same patterns. And this is not so attractive to me.
“I think it’s a reflection; a way to see how we can come back and in what way it makes most sense. As a label, maybe not, maybe as a radio, maybe as an artistic collective, maybe a political organisation, I don’t know.
“But I don’t think that this classic label idea is so attractive to me to spend so much time on it.”
Whatever comes next, you can be sure that it will be suffused with Aguayo’s signature blend of playful resistance.