KVT – Pop Concert with El Guincho

El Rocking El Wonderful El Guincho

El Guincho breezed through Hanoi on their way to TPHCM then Australia via Bangkok and thundered there way on stage at the Youth theater for a set of what his alias, Pablo Diaz-Reixa, describes as “space age exotica” – a body infecting mix of afrobeat, dub, tropicalia and rock.

I was glad that the man who owns the building behind our house wasn’t there to see me enjoy El Guincho and his three friends raunch away with their wonderful stuff as he’d be a bit perplexed at my yelling B#ST#R#D over my balcony every time his jackhammers had gouged away at his concrete walls over the past three months.

It was a quietly appreciative audience that gradually lost most grey haired members as the sounds reared and throbbed around us and it wasn’t until El G gave us an encore that the crowd jumped to its collective feet and started to dance about time I thought!!

I’d just come from Pham Huy Thong’s outstanding exhibition of provocative paintings at the Bui Gallery and was thinking during the first El G piece that not too long ago this sort of decadent music wouldn’t have been able to spread its multitude of cords and chords across this stage when, into my febrile mind came images of Thong’s pink, umbilically co-joined cherubs advancing en-mass from his wonderfully satiric canvass, ‘Purple Sky’ and filling the space behind El G with a dance party scene to parody all dance party scenes anywhere.

Then as the musicians ironed out the sound glitches and got louder each of Thong’s canvasses gradually came to cinematic grinding, pumping life until I finally had to get to my bouncing feet and join the cynical little demons in their bottom wiggling gyrations.

Wonderful night!!! Thanks all you Spaniards who brought this energetic musician + friends to us with his oh so Las Palmas/Barcelona style.

You may have been silly enough to miss out on El Guincho but you’ve got another month left to sample Thong.

Special thanks to artist Pham Huy Thong for the photo!

Click on the image above for a larger version.