Tom Horan 

Quantic: ‘All music is authentic’

DJ and producer Quantic's new album turns everything you thought you knew about Hispanic music on its head. He tells Tom Horan how his six-week trip to Colombia turned into a six-year stay
  
  

Quantic
Quantic, AKA Will Holland: 'The term Latin music is offputting. People think of cheesy bossa nova.' Photograph: PR

On the way from Heathrow, Will Holland's cabbie asked him what he does for a living. "I told him I make electronic music, but I work with Latin musicians. He said: 'Latin, is it? The old Gloria Estefan? She's all right, but I can't understand a word the rest of 'em are saying. And I don't like all them maracas.'" The English DJ and producer has devoted much of his adult life to the celebration of them maracas, and a whole lot more. Indeed, his new album Magnetica – released under his alias Quantic – might just turn everything you think about Hispanic music on its head.

"The term Latin music is offputting for a lot of British people," says Holland, as he installs himself at the bar of a north London pub. "They think of Dirty Dancing or cheesy bossa nova. It's because we don't have a prevalent Latin community in the UK."

Holland has just flown in from his new home in New York to celebrate his 34th birthday. He was born and raised in Worcestershire, but has lived the life of the globe-trotting DJ since his early 20s, except that Holland's trot has often slowed to a meander or even a standstill, and for the past six years he has lived in Colombia. The experience transformed his understanding of music.

"There is one corner of Afrocentric, English-language blues and soul music that we as English people gravitate towards," he says. "It's New Orleans, it's Jamaica, it's what rock stems from – and it is rock that our popular culture is based on. What I saw in Colombia is all these guys who are from that same African diaspora, and have that same rawness and musical history, but have produced something radically different. You find an incredible energy in the music, and yet it's also a very conservative country."

What led Holland to the town of Cali on the Pacific side of South America, where he lived and recorded much of the new album, was a kind of lifelong global record-shopping spree. He traces the stirrings of his vinyl obsession to his early teens, when he first visited Mister Tee's Rock Stop in Kidderminster. "He sold northern soul 7ins and fancy-dress outfits. There was something very wrong about it – and I loved it." From there, he progressed to the Diskery, a Birmingham jazz vendor, whose sounds led him circuitously but unstoppably to his ultimate record shop, his shellac shangri-la – an ironmonger in Puerto Rico.

"It was called The Hardware Store of Santurce in San Juan," he says. "Mops, brooms and nails on level 1. On level 2, every kind of Latin vinyl. The best kind of disorganised record shop – everything intermingled. And the guys there are the link with the past. They've worked in the industry and they can tell you something about every record – and that's a lovely way to learn."

It emerges as Holland tells the stories of his odyssey that learning is a compulsion every bit as undeniable as the acquisition of records. His father was a lecturer in mechanical engineering, and he takes on a professorial air as information cascades out of him: a dozen types of unheard of instrument; unheard of types of music, including bullerengue, pulla, garabato, mapale; the life of Mario Rincon, a deaf engineer at Discos Fuentes records in Medellin, "the Detroit of the Colombian recording industry"; how a Neumann lathe with a Grampian cutterhead can master you millions of discs; and a five-point breakdown of brass-band culture in the rural town where he bought his first accordion.

A glance at the amount of music that Holland has created since, aged 16, he released his first vinyl 45 reveals an appetite for work that matches his thirst for knowledge. Magnetica is his 17th studio album, sitting alongside dozens of singles and remixes for other artists. His output as producer, composer, collaborator and performer spans soul, hiphop, techno, soundtrack, Latin and downtempo. At the same time, all that sifting vinyl has yielded gold, and he has curated rare music for six excellent compilations.

What has made him so prolific? "I feel very privileged to have the way of life I do, and I have to keep working to maintain it. I haven't had to work for someone else since I was 21, pouring gels for DNA strands at the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham. But I don't find making music easy. There is real joy in the social interaction, but there are a lot of annoyances – it can be very frustrating. When I was living in Brighton [home of his label Tru Thoughts] I couldn't afford studio space. Then my father died on Christmas Day 2006. I was desperate for a change of plan, so I decided to try Colombia. I was meant to go for six months. I took my Neve 12-channel portable mixing console, four boxes of records, and some clothes."


Quantic - Duvidó on MUZU.TV.

In combining British music culture with indigenous sounds from around the world, Quantic sits loosely alongside global music adventurers such as Damon Albarn and DJ Gilles Peterson, who releases a new album next month of collaborations with Brazilian artists. But Holland rejects the notion that they are involved in a kind of cultural appropriation.

"That kind of comment never comes from the inside – it comes from people who don't know the country in question. I have never had that kind of animosity from Colombians. With Magnetica, you won't hear that actual music in Colombia. There are elements of it, but you are really being like an artist in residence and working with people there. It's just your take on the music – you're not putting yourself in place of it. It's something parallel. And because race and culture are so intertwined, there is also a race issue: the white boy with a laptop playing black music. But I never forget that I am privileged – to have the financial means to go where I want, and do what I want. When I play music, whatever and wherever, I am celebrating it, not rebranding that music as my own. This is not mash-up, where it's just loops and sampling. On this album I can say: 'Look, there are 12 people playing on this song, I've tracked down the right percussionist and it's an original composition. But I don't really buy the purist, Pete Seeger, Dylan-goes-electric debate about what is authentic. Everything is authentic. Folklore today is kids listening to mobile phones on the bus, or making beats with their PlayStations."

Reading on mobile? Listen to Magentica on Soundcloud here

It's in the amalgamation of the folkloric and the digital that Magnetica – and perhaps Holland's career so far – reaches its zenith. While he has worked with some excellent vocalists, none comes close to Nidia Góngora, a teacher and singer he encountered in the dense mangrove swamps of Colombia's Pacific region. "Pacific culture has not been recognised until recently," Holland says. "It's very poor and historically made up of a black population who escaped from slavery. The Russians signed a deal in the 1980s where they got mining rights for the area, and they sent convicts to do the work. There was a lot of conflict between local people and these guys who were basically illegally mining plutonium, getting drunk on medical alcohol from pharmacies and raping local women. Nidia has songs about these things."

On the album's two stand-out tracks, Holland sets Góngora's eerie, timeless harmonies against rhythm tracks that feel at once primeval and thunderously modern. I can't understand a word she's saying. There are no doubt maracas. But together the boy from Bewdley and the mysterious woman from the mangrove swamps have combined to produce something magical.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*