New Music Month
Guarco (Born Marco Fernando Guarino) is crashing on the couch to plot a revolution. He’s seen the world end in a carnival flourish, and watched life continue despite it all.
The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter’s long-simmering debut Fiebre (“Fever,” guarco.net; August 9, 2011) bursts with sonic tension. It moves frenetically between musical revolutionary and blasé hipster, between worldly sarcasm and magical realism, between Spanish and English. It shakes, questions, and burns, with help from producer, engineer, and friend Ben Kane (D’Angelo, The Roots, Blitz the Ambassador). He may wink at The Pixies, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Caetano Veloso, but his heart beats with Afro-Uruguayan Candombe.
Fiebre will be offered via Guarco’s Facebook band page to fans, the first use of the social networking platform’s apps for independent commercial music distribution. (The app is being built specifically for this project.)
As part of this innovative use of Facebook, purchasers will be able to name their price for the album. This distribution approach will make the music accessible to all, and puts its value in the hands of the listener.
Though rooted in serious Afro-Latin grooves, Fiebre runs the gamut. Blithely plucked ballads with a samba beat (“Monster”), fist-pumping rock anthems (“Rey del la Selva”), and Latin-inflected dub (“Que Paso”) all sprang from Guarco’s in-between vibe. With Kane playing the audio wizard to Guarco’s many-headed muse, songs incubating for over a decade took funky, wild shape.
In Uruguay, Guarco spent months perfecting his percussive guitar style, playing Afro-Latin percussion with a family of drum builders, and laying down rough tracks of his songs in Montevideo. In Brooklyn, he spent months in living room studios, using 4-tracks to make crazy loops, channeling the ghosts of CBGBs and spaced-out realms of dub, mixing the crunk of urbane irony with the feral rock philosophizing of The Clash.
07/28/11
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