Toy Selectah

Emma Warren

We are sitting here with a man known to his family as Antonio Hernández, but better known to us as Toy Selectah. He’s very well-known in his home country of Mexico as part of a huge hip-hop band, Control Machete, also has a background in A&R, in label work. Recently, has been mining the more street-y areas of his hometown for music with Mad Decent and remixes with many different people. You may well have seen his remixes of Vampire Weekend over the last couple of weeks. So say a very warm welcome for Toy Selectah. [applause]

Our first question has to be about this transition you’ve made from being a hip-hop artist, part of a very successful hip-hop outfit, to essentially an up-and-coming artist. How did that happen?

Toy Selectah

First of all, hello to everybody. It’s a pleasure for me to get this invitation. I think this place is amazing and I’ve been seeing pretty, smiling faces all day. She said something that got my attention, about joy and about friendship, I think that’s important. I’ve been living off music for the last 15 years, professionally. I’ve raised my family from music. I started digging records and in the mid-’90s I had the opportunity to get a sampler. I was a fan of hip-hop music so I started making beats and suddenly the beats started making sense. We started putting rhymes over the beats. Back in the day, we fit into the quite kind of alternative scene in Mexico. Then suddenly, we got the opportunity to make a record for a major company, and after that our goal was to make some real Mexican hip-hop music — you know, as a matter of quality, strong, everything. And it happened! We had the opportunity to make three albums with that band. We took South America by storm. I don’t want to say that we were the first, but we were the first to have the opportunity to travel around, to make it in the proper way. After that, it was common just to keep doing beats, first for the band, then for other people. Prior to working for myself and the label, the first thing I did after the hip-hop band was producing. It was interesting that people who wanted to work with me weren’t just hip-hop artists. At that time everybody understood that a hip-hop perspective got their music to somewhere else.

Emma Warren

I just think it’s interesting, because usually when people are in a band that’s quite successful, it becomes very difficult to break out of that and be creative and different to how they were before. You’re kind of trapped sometimes by success, aren’t you? Was it easy for you to do that on the side and make that transition? I know there was time between the end of Control Machete and Toy Selectah, but did you find any difficulties going from one to the other?

Toy Selectah

I think not, it was a natural thing. The band’s success suddenly happened. We made the first album in ‘96. I’d been preparing the beats since ‘94, a period of two years. Then ‘97 was a huge success, ‘98, the second album, then ‘99. Maybe because of the same things you mentioned we ended up kind of tired, overwhelmed by everything. So we stopped around 2000 after two albums. One of the guys from the band left by then, and we did a third album around 2002-2003. I don’t think it was hard to keep going or change because the project just happened that way. It was a case of “The music is sounding good, the beats are sounding good, so let’s record it, let’s make it happen, let’s play.” So the way we decided to stop, it was a natural thing to wake up the next day and start doing beats, looking for something else. The main reason for me to do that was not to be successful or whatever. It was just a natural act, to feed your desire of making music. Did I... [answer your question]?

Emma Warren

No, that was fine, thank you. [laughter] Now, as well as your background in hip-hop and production, you also worked as an A&R in record labels. So it’s quite unusual in this country for A&Rs to also be artists. Obviously, lots of them want to be artists, but it’s not necessarily a very common combination. What did your work as an A&R bring to you as a producer?

Toy Selectah

It’s pretty common for probably one of the majors to recruit the cool… I don’t want to say the coolest, but a cool guy that understands pretty well…

Emma Warren

Connected.

Toy Selectah

Yes, it’s pretty well known for in the Universal system, there are always these kinds of producers, or people that people respect. I was getting a lot of articles after that and some people complain about it. If we’re talking revolutionary, the majors use this knowledge, these connections for a guy that’s maybe been there for a while. It’s funny that it happens this way. In 2003 in the United States, where this interesting situation with Latin urban music that we could straight up connect with the reggaeton phenomenon. This label started distributing everything from Puerto Rico. Suddenly, they noticed that lots and lots of copies of different products have been selling. Control Machete was on the same label, Universal Music, so then they got the idea to put together an imprint that will get all Latino music together in the same building. So I think it was a natural thing for them to look at somebody who had been working in the streets for some years, like six or seven years by then. So we found the label – this is so funny and this is really interesting to talk about – they take the name of the band. They put me on a crossroads, they’re calling me saying, “Hey, what do you think about this?” So I started working, giving them ideas. I enjoyed it. It was good for me, it was kind of like a master’s degree, going back to college to understand business completely and to understand how a major works in every aspect. So anyway, after three months developing the idea, they said, “We know how we will call the label.” “Yeah, how will you name it?” “Machete.” I said, “What? Come on, that’s my band.” It pushed me into making a decision. Should I leave because I don’t agree with this, or should I just take it? So I just took it for the experience. After that, after five years, that label is not going any more as an imprint. It was one project that evolved to world stardom. They really profited from the genre. I got a really cool opportunity, as I told you yesterday, being there for three years and doing what I’m doing now, connecting the dots of what’s going on five years later.

Emma Warren

Very shortly we should hear some of your music, because it’s very well to hear you talking, but without the music we can’t connect with what you’re doing. But before that, you started talking about reggaeton and you told me yesterday that reggaeton really didn’t happen in South America until about 2009, three or four years after it had been all over western Europe and America. There was a sense that reggaeton had happened in Puerto Rico, been adopted in the northern hemisphere and then come back down to essentially its home. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Toy Selectah

It’s probably not that it didn’t happen until 2009, but if you travel now to Argentina or Colombia, since last year, it’s been there since always, and it’s been huge since the beginning, when the big hits started. But, say, someone goes to Argentina and goes to a club, instead of listening to someone like Paul Van Dyk, it’s reggaeton in the club in every social class or level. That gets people’s attention, saying, “Is this thing really big now?” It takes some time for a rhythm to get to there. The reggaeton story is interesting. It’s not about the aesthetic or the paraphernalia or the rhymes or the players of the genre. What is interesting to me is it’s a genre that’s based on a PC, on the FruityLoops program and these guys have been making beats for 15 years, and some of them are millionaires, making beats on a PC, straight-up, from ‘90s dancehall chopped sounds. That gets me the idea of that’s how music spreads and socializes, a system of making music happens… I don’t want to use the term Third World, but some of our southern countries don’t get access to have a PC in every home. That happened just in the last ten years. For people in Mexico — I will talk about my country — it wasn’t possible for working class families to get a PC until 2002 — and by credit. The power and the possibility for kids to make music, it was, get a computer. Instead of get turntables or a sampler or an MPC. Not everybody had access to a sampler or an MPC in 1998, maybe. So in our countries, the possibility to get something to make music is pretty new. We, and some other people here, we are into music since very late. We had a record player in our house, a piano in my house. But the whole country, the whole amount of people doesn’t have that opportunity. Maybe a ghetto-blaster or something. But when the PC arrived in the house, it translated into the possibility of making beats.

Emma Warren

So there’s a practical and economic element to how a scene develops.

Toy Selectah

I think reggaeton was a good example of that. Before it happened in the whole of South America, because remember in Puerto Rico, it’s dollars there and the US passport there. So they got the access maybe five years before or eight years before, so that’s why reggaeton was probably the first rhythm that happened. The common things between that and baile funk, what was happening in Brazil around 2005, it was probably happening in Puerto Rico around 2000. Now it’s happening in Mexico in 2008, 2009, with new genres around that type of PC-based music.

Emma Warren

There’s lots more to talk about but now can you select something of yours so we can listen to the Toy Selectah sound?

Toy Selectah

The Vampire Weekend thing is really interesting. I met these guys in Mexico through a friend who booked them for a festival last year and he called me and said, “I’m with the Vampire Weekend guys and they’re asking for you.” I was supposed to call them to help get them through the city. So it was a natural thing and when I got there Ezra [Koenig] was like, “Hey! Do you know this?” And it was a remix of Julieta Venegas that I did three years ago. They said, “Yeah, yeah, Julieta told me that.” So I hung out with them for two weeks, talking, talking, we went to the studio. I went to Mexico City with them, I showed them the city. I was thinking, “One day we’ll end up together doing something music-wise.” In the middle of the last year, they called me and told me they wanted to do something but they didn’t know what to do. So we ended up with the idea of mashing up the whole album and making tracks around that. Kind of a megamix. I released a kind of bootleg album of remixes on Mad Decent last year, on a web-based release.

Emma Warren

That was the Mex-More?

Toy Selectah

They loved it and they told me, “Yeah, we need that.” So I told them I would do it, I’ll put the whole album in two tracks but I will not use any other sounds aside from the band’s studio sessions. The cool thing about that project is that the mash-ups, or megamixes, we call them “melts,” are done exclusively from sounds from their sessions. It was interesting because it was a remix the old- school way, when you take parts just from the original tapes and melt it.

Emma Warren

So not making your own track and then putting a couple of samples from their tune on top of that?

Toy Selectah

It was quite harrowing because I had to open up 12 different sessions, pick the sounds I liked and then make it all work together as a matter of notes, harmonies and structures.

Emma Warren

Why did you want to do it like that?

Toy Selectah

Because I thought that was the whole idea, to mash up them, but from them! Not trying to bring something from the outside world to their album. I feel really satisfied with the confidence they got to send me one of the hottest albums of the year six months before, all the seesions, a hard disc full of their work. I was kind of overwhelmed by that. I thought, “How can I turn something out that I will be satisfied with my whole life?” Instead of looking for trends or instead of looking for whatever, let’s just take what these guys did and select and chop, just their point of view of how to make music.

Emma Warren

I think now is the ideal time to press play.

Toy Selectah

This is one of the melts.

Emma Warren

Which one in particular?

Toy Selectah

Number two, maybe. I change tempo, I mix different songs, beats from one song to another song.

(music: Vampire Weekend & Toy Selectah — “Contramelt B” / applause)

Emma Warren

That’s a pretty joyful sound right there. I know Vampire Weekend have their own, but you added your own level of joy there. Can you break down for us what was happening there?

Toy Selectah

I got back to them and told them I’d use no sounds other than theirs after I opened the sessions, and I really enjoyed digging through their sessions. OK, let’s get to something technical. When you do a remix for somebody, they send you pretty much stems or, like a rock band, they send you the session itself. So what I always do is open the session and let’s try to get excited with something I find. So when I opened this session, I started getting crazy because these guys were already where I like to be with as a music guy. I found a lot of rhythms I like, a lot of drums, I found reggaeton rhythms, like shakers, drums, interesting Afropop stuff. So think about how cool it was, “I’ll take this, I’ll take that.” So by the fourth song I did I said, “Fuck it. We don’t need any other sounds, any other sources, yours are so great.” They were playing the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” break on the drums [sings drum beat]. When I was listening to those naked sounds, I thought, “Yeah. This is it, so let’s start making loops from there, making notes about keys.” It’s interesting because a band like that, an album is the pretty much the same vibe, same type of sounds, or even same type of melodies, structures, chord progressions. I understood that really quick and when I talked to them about that, they were very excited about the idea. When I showed them the final work they were excited, really excited. That’s what I like about remixes. It’s really hard from the other side, as a musician, when someone wants you to remix, It took me ten years to understand that it’s not about what I want as a musician or as a band, doing remixes for somebody else. It’s what the other one needs to play, to actually play, like a remix. This project was kind of a circle, because I liked it and they liked it. It works for them and it works for me.

Emma Warren

What did you have to do to these raw elements to make it sound like you?

Toy Selectah

Choose the tempo. It was really easy, because after I opened sessions, cut loops and cut parts, I just dropped it to [Ableton] Live and started making the new structure that worked, understanding which part is the verse, which part is the hook, which part is the same harmony of another song. Does someone got a question about it? I understand there’s a question. It’s easy, as you probably understand, I just cut loops and then put it together and then start making a new structure that works as a five-minute track. And after that everyone involved in the project realized that this is a really cool way to listen to an album in ten minutes. [laughter]

Emma Warren

Speed version. When they heard it back were they identifying different parts of a song?

Toy Selectah

Completely. They got really, really excited and they were, “Oh, you take this and you put that…” The one I got really big impression from is this guy Rostam [Batmanglij], the producer, not the singer, the other guy who puts the music together. He sent me a message that made my day. He told me, “I’m melting listening to this.” So we did the two tracks that compiled their whole album sounds and a remix of their first single, and they released that. It was really cool for me because it was my first XL Recordings release. They made a single CD that they gave away in all the independent record stores when people bought the album.

Emma Warren

So has this opened you up to a new audience?

Toy Selectah

It’s definitely opened me to a new audience. I always got that understanding that I’m probably not just a club DJ, or not just a hip-hop DJ, or not just a tropical DJ. I don’t know, I’m an alternative.

Emma Warren

“I am an alternative.” [laughter] One of the things you seem to do a lot of is remixing. The Vampire Weekend project is an example of very collaborative remixing, very different to the normal way that people remix and very different to the normal relationships you have with people you’re remixing. You seem to work quickly, is that true?

Toy Selectah

Is that true? Hmm. Last night I was here until five in the morning and looking at all you guys I get excited. Around two in the morning I got an email from a friend saying, “Hey! What’s up with my remix? I need to deliver the master parts.” So yeah, I remembered I needed to do that. In a matter of two hours, I get out of here at five in the morning, someone is knocking on the door of the studio, I just put together da, da, da, boom, boom, boom. You need to develop a way to do it quickly. When somebody’s telling you for months, “Yeah, I’m trying. Yeah, I’m doing it,” that’s not true. If you deliver the parts, it’s really easy now. I don’t want to say easy, but you develop a way to understand where you want to take something, where you want to go with something.

Emma Warren

This is kind of a silly question with a serious question underneath. Is it sometimes better just to bang things out than to spend a long time thinking about it?

Toy Selectah

I think it’s definitely better to flow, to play. Put the tempo you like and go with the first instinct that you like. If you’re making a club track or if you’re making a slow jam, just be sure, be confident of what you’ve got in your head. Hust say, “Yes, 110, black, 110, let’s do it.” For me, that works. If you say, “OK. Let’s do this in 120.” Boom. From that…

Emma Warren

So often, for you the starting point is deciding on the BPM and letting it unfold from there. Or is it starting with an idea of how you want it to sound, or is it starting with a sound?

Toy Selectah

I keep going the straight-up hip-hop way still. Probably the tempo and the first groove that gets you. Let’s say from your source, let’s say for that. Probably the first groove in this was the drums, [plays music] this was the first thing. I like this. So, boom! And that drum gives everything. So I really believe it’s a matter of the source, if you get that session we were talking about, open up, choose the most exciting sound you can find and take it from there.

Emma Warren

So can we have a listen to something from that Mex-More remix compilation, another one of those remixes and you can tell us about that too.

Toy Selectah

This was one of the most interesting. I’ve got an interesting story about this.

(music: Santigold – “Shove It (Toy Selectah Cumbia Remix)” / applause)

This is Santigold. I didn’t get the parts for that. I started doing remixe maybe around when Control [Machete] happened, around ‘99, and to be honest with you it took me some time to get to the point where I liked it, where I really enjoyed and was proud. It was a natural thing, the remixes started happening when I started playing and DJing a lot. This compilation, the Mex-More, it was done out of a need to play that song in my set. That song is a reggae thing, the original is really slow [imitates original], so I really liked the song, I really liked the melody, but it didn’t fit into my set at all. So let’s take it to something I can play and can use to kill at a party. When I realized that, remixes started coming together. I really believe things start happening when you really need it.

Emma Warren

So we’ve just reached this magical cumbia word, which is really at the heart of everything you do.

Toy Selectah

Wait, wait, wait, the story. I forgot the story.

Emma Warren

Pause. Rewind. We’ll come back.

Toy Selectah

I don’t want to say that they listened to my remix, but three months later when I put it on my MySpace, that Santigold version, probably it had no relationship, but this happened.

(music: Jay-Z feat. Santogold – “Brooklyn Go Hard”)

Probably Kanye had been digging MySpace. [laughter] No, no, no, it’s obviously the Brooklyn force right there.

Emma Warren

So how does cumbia connect your music to what you’re doing? And then the bigger question, how does it connect the whole of the continent?

Toy Selectah

That’s long.

Emma Warren

So what we need is an encyclopedic answer, but we can’t do that here. But we need to know your connection to cumbia, then we need to know kind of “cumbia 101,” where you’re explaining to us the movement of the rhythm.

Toy Selectah

But you need to know what cumbia is. Cumbia is a rhythm straight-up 100 percent from Columbia, I’ve got nothing but love and respect for the motherland. It’s a combination of two things, the Amerindian culture and the African descendant culture, a rhythm that happens to be in Colombia. It’s interesting to point out that the first town free from slavery in the whole continent was Palenque, Colombia. As I told you, cumbia is a rhythm coming from a word or term coming from Guinea, called cumbé. That is basically a combination of a pattern. So what cumbia means to Latin America is it’s probably the only one rhythm that is going over the whole continent, in the Spanish speaking [parts].

Emma Warren

Shall we get your map up?

Toy Selectah

Yeah, but we don’t have a plug.

Emma Warren

Oh, we had a map for you so we can do some sonic geography. I love a bit of map.

Toy Selectah

They are too new. I’ve got the old computer and they’ve just got the new connections.

Emma Warren

Never mind, so you can imagine it yourself.

Toy Selectah

But cumbia is a pretty simple two-by-four pattern.

Emma Warren

Sorry, just a minute, you mentioned it’s a combination of Amerindian rhythms and African heritage as well. Before you go any further, can you just explain a bit more what you mean there?

Toy Selectah:

Amerindian is the indigenous people from Latin America, like Morenos, brown people that came from ancient culture. They could be from Peru, Aztec, Mayan, whatever. And the African people who came later.

Emma Warren

But I suppose, what I’m asking really is what are the Amerindian rhythms and what role would they have?

Toy Selectah

The Amerindian influence was probably the sound of the gaita, a wood flute. It would be a combination of that, the melody or the sound of that instrument and the African rhythm.

Emma Warren

So these are rhythms which traveled with people who arrived on the continent through the slave trade?

Toy Selectah

Definitely, yes. So that combination happens. We could play something that is from now, but it’s a perfect example. You will probably know this, our Colombian friend will definitely know.

(music: unknown)

The simplicity of the pattern fits with a lot of stuff.

Emma Warren

(to audience) Did you guys hear what Toy was saying about that tune while it was playing? You did? OK.

Toy Selectah

We jump from regional things to last summer. What happens with cumbia in my city – and let’s keep going with the story – is that when I was making Mexican hip-hop, I got out into the streets, I was digging. What I found in my city was three things: mariachi music; norteño music, which is kind of a polka, Mexican accordion stuff; and I found Colombian records. This thing that I’m telling you, that cumbia is all around the Spanish-speaking area, even including LA, Chicago, New York, is because of the records. The powerhouses of Colombia really did their job in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, producing such an incredible amount of music that they pressed and sent all over South America. So Me and the whole city in Monterrey in the late ‘70s, it happened that we adopted that particular kind of rhythm and that particular kind of Colombian music. That is not the only one. I told you yesterday that we could talk about eight, nine, or more than ten, really, really, really interesting styles or types of rhythms that happened in Colombia in the last two hundred or three hundred years. Being from Monterrey, Mexico, probably because of records, probably because, I don’t know, magic or whatever, we embrace Colombian music as much as Colombians. This is a funny thing. When I went to Colombia, after Mexico, it’s the place that loves mariachi more than any other in the world. After Mexico, you can find mariachis in Colombia and they really love Mexican music and they really love ranchera music. They live with it probably as we live with Colombian music. Something happens right there between these two countries. So in Monterrey, it happens with these albums. As me, I probably found them in the mid ’90s, but people have been in love with Colombian music since the late-‘70s. So, in the ghetto in Monterrey they start playing and developing their own way of Colombian music. It happened naturally because back in the day it was hard to get Colombian bands to Mexico to tour, so they developed their own way to play it. We could listen to something else, the exact sound that Monterrey embraced it and transformed, before samplers, before hip-hop, before everything. This is a special style of sound. We listen to the very raw or very traditional sound. After that, when people started recording that sound, big orchestras transformed the sound of the flute and the rhythms to a kind of big band stuff that was huge. Stuff like this.

(music: unknown)

(music: Celso Piña – unknown)

(music: Andres Landero – unknown)

(music: Andres Landero – unknown)

(music: Celso Piña – unknown)

So as I told you, ghetto music in Monterrey was this for the last 40 years. Obviously, it evolved and they were looking for some stuff when planes and globalization and everything we started getting, we embraced the music and people started playing it. Because norteño music is also the same accordion. It was not the keyboard accordion, it was the button accordion, the same one as in norteño music. So these were the two musics in my city. So after that, the ‘80s and ‘90s in Monterrey was about cumbia, so we grew up on that.

Emma Warren

Now, there’s some interesting music happening in the ghettos now, isn’t there? A sort of step on from cumbia. Can you tell us about it?

Toy Selectah

It’s obviously because of what’s there, everything starts getting new school.

Emma Warren

What’s the name? Tell us that.

Toy Selectah

No, wait a minute. [laughs] These guys I just played, they did an album in 2001 and invited me to produce one song. That song is a huge hit, not just in traditional Mexican music but in MTV and rock stations, because that was the thesis of taking that sound, to get it related to soundsystem culture and reggae and hip-hop. This was after Control Machete. It was kind of my theory to combine the ghetto sound of the city. This was 2001, this is called “Cumbia Sobre El Rio,” it was a huge hit, gold status.

(music: Celso Piña feat. Control Machete – “Cumbia Sobre El Rio”)

This song is important and interesting because by the time this was happening in Mexico, the sound of cumbia started happening all the way down south to Argentina. At the same time, Pablo Lescano from Damas Gratis, the guy who developed something called cumbia villera in Argentina, that refers to cumbia from the ghetto. It’s really raw lyric- wise, talking about social stuff, what’s happening in the ghetto in Argentina. When I met him, he had this long hair rock lookalike, tropical whatever outfit. Then when they got this song they started smoking joints and trying to put drums and club things to what they’d been doing. I will play a little bit of Damas Gratis so you guys can understand what developed, the foundation of the sound in Argentina.

(music: Damas Gratis – unknown)

Emma Warren

Now we now have a much clearer picture of the music and the lineage. But you just mentioned Bersa Discos. They’re based in San Francisco. We all know about Diplo and Mad Decent, they’ve been really good at magnetizing music that perhaps other people didn’t know about and bringing it to the forefront. Have Bursa also been important in showcasing South American music?

Toy Selectah

It was interesting. By 2006 this music was really big in Argentina, all the reggae and dancehall singers, a scene that is really big in South America, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, in Venezuela and Mexico, the reggae and the dancehall is a big scene. So those two things together developed an interesting thing. By 2006 two labels just started putting music together, compiling what producers and artists had been doing there. Like, more glitchy sounds with cumbia rhythms, or more reggae stuff with cumbia rhythms, more mash-ups and remixes and stuff. That was Bursa Discos and ZZK. Interestingly enough, it was two American guys living in Argentina who get the excitement of what was going on in clubs. After that, I don’t want to talk about digital cumbia in a way because I’m not living in Argentina and it’s not my story. At the same time I was doing the A&R in Machete, getting that experience with the reggaeton rhythms. I met Diplo in 2005 the first time that M.I.A. played in New York City. It got my attention that he was playing a combination of Baltimore rhythms and reggaeton and some dancehall and some baile funk. So I went to him and told him, “I’m Antonio Hernández, the A&R of this label, I really like what you’re doing with the baile funk stuff. I have the idea of remixing Don Omar, a big reggaeton artist in a baile funk way. This is my card, let’s get together.” So that day I was with Mr. Vegas, the dancehall singer, because I was trying to sign him to do a collaboration album with a Puerto Rican artist. So at the end of that day Mr. Vegas said, “Let’s go, we’re going to drop some vocals for this guy Diplo.” So we got an apartment and Diplo and M.I.A. were there that night. We started talking about this and I was showing Diplo all this stuff. I gave him a lot of music. I think I lent him the Puerto Rican reggaeton library in his hand. Two weeks later I get an email, like, “Man, what’s up? This is crazy, unbelievable source of sounds.” From that day I started a relationship with Diplo, sending him stuff. Back in the day he was really into baile funk and that’s what I find interesting. That point of view, Diplo looking for new stuff opened lots of doors for everybody. Three years later, what we are seeing is that everywhere in the world there are these types of new-school rhythms happening, combining traditional stuff from everywhere and new-school PC-based stuff. To finish, I want to show you something that happens outside of this cumbia phenomenon, something I will play and you’ll say, “OK, that’s cumbia too.” But it’s not cumbia. It’s something really ghetto, outside of the global labels like Mad Decent or Akwaaba, but what I found in common is everybody’s trying to show or to embrace the peripheral genres. Like, reggaeton starts on an island, or as cumbia develops from Colombia and Argentina to Mexico, or in Angola kuduro, something that is getting attention from a lot of guys in United Kingdom or LA, or even Belgium or Germany, is something called tribal guarachero. It’s really interesting because as we talked before, it’s based on 132 BPM, straight up, and it combines traditional percussive sounds with something that I found almost Aztec. They’re combining what we’ve been listening to as Mexicans with pre-Hispanic era music. Some of you probably listen to stuff like this, but it’s quite interesting. I found a 6/8 accents on this.

(music: unknown)

They call it trival guarachero, like tribal. I think this is a combination of kids listening to tribal music, like house, but it’s something really interesting because it happens outside of the story I’ve been telling you about. I don’t know if it relates or not, but this has got legions of people dancing to this and producing music like this.

Emma Warren

And this is music you’d pick up in flea-markets rather than in record shops.

Toy Selectah

Definitely, it’s not in record shops, it’s in flea-markets and on the internet. It’s been getting big and big in the last three years and it’s something you can find on a Sunday in underage bars that doesn’t sell alcohol, just sodas and stuff from 5pm to 9pm. So I think this is a new generation of kids dancing and doing music.

Emma Warren

A little taste of the future. We should pass it out to you guys fairly soon. Perhaps even now. Yeah, now! Not in a minute, but now. Who has some questions?

Audience Member

Hi, thanks for that. The kind of cumbia records that come to Australia aren’t particularly common, so the only things I’ve managed to pick up tend to be like hip-hop remixes of the traditional, like some of the ones you played at the beginning, just a bit housed up. Do you think that’s a positive or do you prefer to see people do the new-school sound? Do you think they should be pushing it further instead of remixing the old stuff or is it all positive to you?

Toy Selectah

I don’t want to say it’s positive or negative, it just happens. It’s probably the producers who are doing the mash-ups and the remixes are the ones who connect first to MySpace or to blogs. So I think that’s a natural thing that happens. [picks mic up and laughs] It’s neither positive nor negative, it’s just the guys who get to MySpace easily or the ones who get to Australia through some American guys who get the idea to release it. Or the ones like Diplo, who did a set with a couple of remixes and then another amount of guys, kids listen to it. I think that’s normal, but what I found out… is think about reggae. Reggae started getting big with dancehall, then through dancehall you get to the roots, you get to other rhythms and you get to the old-school stuff. So I think it’s a normal way to develop something.

Audience Member

One other thing is, I’m from Melbourne in Australia, which is obviously very detached from Colombia or South America. So why do you think people my age, white suburban kids in Melbourne, find it to be such fantastic music? Why has it found such a space in club culture so far from where it comes from?

Toy Selectah

I think because it’s real and that happens first in the place where it starts. I think it gets to there because probably someone went to a club in South America and felt it and danced to it and he bought a mixtape or he digged in something and then showed it to someone else. Then someone else showed it to you and you went crazy, too, and then some DJ went traveling there and played it.

Emma Warren

[inaudible] But apart from how it spreads, why are people feeling it even if they’re not from there?

Toy Selectah

Because it’s real, it’s like an example of what’s been going on with music everywhere in the last, [however long]. It’s a hard question to answer because what goes through my mind is because it’s real, because it’s happening somewhere else, so you don’t feel it’s an unreal music.

Audience Member

It has a kind of naïveté, it seems very happily produced, not over-thought, not over-tried. They just do it.

Toy Selectah

Interesting, so you answered the question then. [laughter]

Audience member

Sometimes I’ll buy a record like that and start playing it and my first response is to laugh, it’s so you can hear, just little snippets of something arranged in FruityLoops. But that’s fantastic because it works.

Toy Selectah

It gets me thinking about the Vampire Weekend experience again. I’m pretty sure these guys enjoyed doing the album they did. Then if someone likes it or not, if it’s too corny or not, when I opened those sessions I found they really enjoyed writing that music. That’s probably why I got excited chopping it.

Emma Warren

Let the joy flow.

Toy Selectah

That’s a good thing. Joy flow.

Audience Member

Hi, please tell us a little bit more about making your beats and rhythms.

Toy Selectah

Yeah, I came from an MPC background but the first Control Machete album wasn’t done an MPC, it was done on Apple’s 2.1 in about 1995. That was hard because I was trying to chop loops and time-stretch loops with Sound Designer. I’m telling you the truth, making numbers. Thinking, “This number belongs to 94 BPM, so by 98 BPM it needs to be…”, equations to chop samples. So what I do in my main thing is source library loops and samples, chop it. That’s basically what I do. Now I work in Ableton Live and the first thing after putting together some beats and rhythms is take the bass. Either on synth or a bass. That’s how I work. I got music lessons in the early ‘80s, so I understand structure and harmony and melody. But I’ve never been good at playing an instrument, playing the piano, so it’s always been a matter of pushing buttons. But basically I work everything in Ableton Live and mix in ProTools.

Audience Member

Hello, hi. I’m very excited to get this chance to ask you this question. It’s about a song that’s slightly old but I hope that’s okay. I was just playing it for him a few days ago – he’s from Mexico. I live in India and we get a lot of music through the movies, so Amores Perros – I have two questions if that’s OK – can you tell us a bit about the story of the song and how you wrote it?

Toy Selectah

Amores Perros is called in English “love’s a bitch.” Bad name. It was in 2000, I think, that Alejandro González Iñárritu, one of the most interesting movie directors from Mexico, did that movie. It’s interesting that this guy came from a radio background and a music background and a digger. He’s always been a digger, making production. I remember because he was on a famous radio station in Mexico City called WFM that was really into the production of stuff. He likes the sound of Control Machete and he chose it. “I like this song and I like that song, so let’s try to put it in the movie.” That song is not in the movie actually, it’s on the soundtrack, Because they used two songs from the band on the soundtrack, they decided to do a tribute album with a lot of artists and they asked me to make a song for that. It’s a beautiful song with Ely Guerra, a singer from Mexico with a beautiful voice and back then I was really into the Bristol sound. So it’s a translation to a Mexican Bristolized trip-hop [laughs]. But he’s really good. His next movie was 21 Grams, then after that he did Babel. He used “Cumbia Sobre El Rio” in Babel and it was kind of big in that movie because when they cross the border with the kids, it’s two minutes and a half of that song. It’s probably the relationship with the way he listens to music and the way he understands what’s going on in the sound spectrum.

Audience Member

My second question is also related to that, but from more of an industry or business angle. Since Amores Perros was such an important film and went all around the world, did it impact the band in any way? Because your music was part of that film.

Toy Selectah

It definitely opens other windows. OK, I’ve got the perfect answer. Since I did that song on that movie I’ve put probably tracks in another ten movies. I’ve just done a really interesting documentary. I’m not a film-scoring guy, I just did tracks that fit to a movie. Last year there was a big documentary about a guy who’d been incriminated in a murder. It’s called Presumed Guilty. This guy happens to be an MC from a ghetto in Mexico City, called Iztapalapa. It’s because the music supervisor from Amores Perros has always been there and she happens to be a friend. OK, interesting story. How that song gets to Amores Perros is because that girl, the music supervisor that gave us another ten tracks in movies, was the MTV director when Control Machete happened. So after being MTV program director she turns into a music supervisor and she’s been doing movies ever since then.

Audience Member

Thank you very much, it’s one of my favorite songs ever so I’m very excited to ask you about it.

Emma Warren

So maybe just another one or so. You’re going to be around for a couple of days, aren’t you?

Toy Selectah

Yes, I’m around.

Emma Warren

Toy’s around for a couple of days, so hit him up with some questions or just hang out and pick his brains on music or whatever. Any more questions? I think that means we’re done. Do you have anything more to say?

Toy Selectah

Yeah, all this cumbia thing and everything, I just want to clear out, it’s not new, man. My main inspiration from this is on my MySpace, a quick video from Joe Strummer talking about this 20 years ago. So it’s nothing new, it’s always been there. I’m really happy to be in the UK, and I’ve been really happy to be here in the last two years hustling, getting to Hackney and bars and carrying my backpack and trying to do it. This thing has been here so enjoy what you're doing and get back to your homes and keep doing it. Because this is the life to live, so be happy.

[applause]

Emma Warren

Absolutely. Toy Selectah, thank you very much.