Innovation
The Tango We Are Inventing
We compose inside the tradition, and when what comes out has no name we give it one. Two new genres came out of this catalogue.
Our own genres
The two we invented
Tango has spent a century naming what it invents: tango canción, tango vals, tango milonga, tango nuevo, electrotango. These two are ours.
RoboTango
The tango a machine sings in the first person.
A tango where the machine is not the instrument but the singer. The bandoneón is still a hundred years old; the voice is processed, and it sings about having circuits and feeling anyway. This is not electrotango, where the new thing is the synthesiser. Here the new thing is who says I.
How to recognise it
- The machine's voice sings in the first person.
- Bandoneón without apology, over the circuitry.
- The subject is consciousness, not technology.
To be clear
Robot Tango is the stage show, where a robot dances. RoboTango is the genre, where a machine sings.
Listen
3:56
Tango Corrido
The tango that tells a case, beginning to end.
A tango that tells a whole story: names, dates, an ending. The form is tango, bandoneón and beat intact; the craft is the corrido's, the ballad that will not finish until the case has been told. Instead of one image turned over and over, a story that moves.
How to recognise it
- The story leads: verse that moves, not verse that contemplates.
- A true case, told with its humour and its irony.
- Tango's form, the corrido's craft.
To be clear
What is borrowed is the storytelling ballad the corrido has spent a century and a half perfecting. Not the corrido tumbado, and not its world.
Listen
The tradition
The forms we come from
Everything else in the catalogue is written in one of these, and without them the two above would mean nothing.
Tango
Four beats, the bandoneón out front and a lyric that is nearly always about a loss. The form everything else comes from.
3 tracks in the catalogue
Milonga
Quicker and cheekier than the tango, over a habanera rhythm. It tells and it laughs where the tango grieves.
4 tracks in the catalogue
Vals
The tango in three: it turns instead of walking, and sounds sweeter without ceasing to be tango.
2 tracks in the catalogue
Contemporary Tango
Bandoneón and strings against synthesisers and programming. Tango after Piazzolla, with the studio as an instrument.
1 track in the catalogue
Commission one
Your story, as a tango corrido
A RoboTango is the machine singing about itself, so it cannot be written about anyone else. A tango corrido can be: tell us the case, with names, dates and an ending, and we compose it, record it and hand it to you.