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From NPR Music, this is Hot Latino. I'm Felix Contreras.
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And I'm Ana Maria Sayer. Let the chisme begin. The chiefs made this week is that Spain won the Mundial.
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Quite a celebration. I just read that there were millions celebrating in Madrid.
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Of course, I will not lie. I saw the images of people celebrating in Madrid and I was like, Mexico City looked like that after we won every single game. But
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so. And it made us think back to just so much of the music from Spain that we had been featuring over the years. And we have had a nice representation of music from Spain, various genres, cultural styles, attitudes, everything over the years, many, many years.
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Felix, I have talked so much about how exciting I find the Spanish scene to be. I mean, it really is this level of innovative and exciting and new and fresh all the time that I find myself bringing Spanish artists on all the time just because they do something interesting. And so I was really excited to have an opportunity to be able to talk more about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and revisit a lot of artists I've already brought on the show and maybe a few that we haven't heard before.
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And I think that we have to start with the Setengana tiny desks that he produced in April of 2021. It was just astounding. It was really. I remember seeing it for the first time and just completely blown away with the presentation of what he had done on his album. But then what he was doing in real life and how it just completely, really captured to me my understanding of the essence of this Spanish scene. Amazing.
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Felix. It is absolutely one of my favorite tiny desks, honestly, in general, especially of the home one. So let's hear a little bit of it. That was Setangana playing his home Tiny desk concert. Now, Felix, for those who don't know, Setangana is probably one of the most interesting, innovative producers to come out of Spain in recent years. I mean, he notoriously worked on Rosalia's earlier projects. He's constantly collaborating in a way that I find not only fascinating, but really refreshing. He's also super friends with Karin Leon. He's responsible for that incredible flamenco regional album that I brought on a couple months back. And he really just has, I don't know, he has vision he has a really interesting vision. He came out with an album a couple years ago that a lot of these songs are from that was really focused, El Madri Leno that was really focused on, you know, paying homage to a lot of sounds from a lot of places. And that's something that I see again and again with Spanish artists, with especially these producers from this Madrid scene, which is what I want to talk about first. Felix, if we're going to go point by point on the most exciting parts of Spanish music right now, we have to talk about all my favorite producers in Madrid.
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The floor is yours.
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Okay, so I've talked to you about this before, but great opportunity to talk about it again. There's this amazing collective of producers called Rusia IDK in Madrid. And the first person that I want to play you a song from is an artist named Ralphie Chu, and this is his latest single, Baby, baby.
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Face Sometimes it's hard to face her Sometimes it's hard to face Sometimes it's hard Baby, baby, baby baby baby baby baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby.
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Now, Felix, I have talked a lot about these producers. There's Ralphie Chu, who I see is one of the originators, one of the big names in there. There's Russowski, who I brought in for a tiny desk. There's also a bunch of smaller artists in there, and they really do work as this kind of beautiful collective. Referring back to the setting on a tiny desk that we played earlier. That. That energy, that culture of Sobra Mesa, of everyone sitting around, jamming together. They do that, but electronically, which is really unique in. In how they do it. And they're always bringing in interesting new sounds that I haven't heard before. Another artist from this collective who's a lot so smaller. His name is Mora. And I want to play you one of actually my favorite songs that I heard, like, in the last, I don't know, year. And this is his collaboration with Settingana. It's called Droga.
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Oh, my God, the creativity, man. That. That whole bachata intro. It just the flow over the bongo with a little guitar plucking and then the. The drop. Yeah, just carry on, gentlemen. Carry on. You guys are killing it.
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And that's what I mean, Fe, where there's kind of no rules for them. You know what I mean? And I think part of that is because they are picking and pulling and plucking from a lot of the Spanish language world. And so they don't feel the need to be like, well, a bachata sounds like this, which. Okay, so let's revisit the conversation because we've talked about it a lot, right? Like Spanish artists, just like Settingana did, really, doing these kind of albums that survey a lot of traditional Latin American sounds, which are obviously rooted in Africa, all these rhythms. But Chata merengue lo quesea. We've talked about it a lot. We both kind of feel it's fair game.
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Listen, I don't care what anybody thinks. That's. I completely agree.
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Fight me, fight me says Felix on his face.
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It is, man.
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It is. It's music.
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I just had this conversation in an email with someone, with a friend of mine just today, talking about Brazilian music and Latin music and all these titles, you know, the titles I explained to him, and the term Latin music, it just. It's useless at this point when you have a creativity that we just heard Spanish language music that was bachata to a dance thing to like. It's. There are no terms and it's completely open. I don't think that it's appropriation or anything like that at all.
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But, you know, fight me and always with respect, right? Like, that's the thing.
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Exactly.
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With respect, with pop retribution.
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One of the. One of the things that impresses me every time you bring something in on it is just the amount of. I don't know what you would consider indie artists, people who are not affiliated with either a label, a sound, or just a particular tradition. But their music all comes together in a way that just.
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We find a place for it, you know, Felix. And that's one of the things, too, about Spain right now is I'm talking about. You know, I started by talking about these madrileno artists who are very electronic, really interesting producers. A lot of people in Latin America want to go work with them, collaborate with them, to have that producer, producer experience. But there's also these absolutely incredible alternative artists who are doing their own project, doing their own thing, and it just doesn't sound like anything, you know, I've ever heard. There's this artist, Bikoko. I think I've showed you her before, but I'm just gonna play you her again. She's absolutely amazing. I'm gonna play you a bit of this track called Fortia.
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Sam.
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Okay, Before I get into it, I want to play you one more from her called La Mano.
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You thought you were about done for today? Nothing stops in here Until I say Until I say I'm the voice in your head and I'm here to stay don't even have to try, you could never run away. I've tried to make it stop, but I. It goes on and on and it gets hard to.
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I wish I could come back as a 20 something year old producer who knows how to work all this technology that just creates this amazing rhythm stuff. I'm just so blown away by the nuance of the rhythm of all this stuff. It's just crazy, crazy good.
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It's so expressive in this very specific way that. Especially when we're talking about Spain, right? Like there is. There's this kind of insulation, I guess you could say of the country because it is language distinct from its bordering countries. Like you don't get that in Latin America, right? There's a lot of cross border exchange in this very natural. But also maybe sometimes limiting in a way way maybe limiting for innovation, but. But in Spain they're really isolated and so they pull from Europe and there's clearly a lot of European influence in what she's doing, what a lot of artists are doing, you know, from the dance scene in Europe and things like that. But then you do get. There's almost like. To me, Felix, like a flamenco tone to her rhythm. Do you get what I'm saying? Like the way that she moves. It's really fascinating to me. And we were talking earlier, Felix, on one side it doesn't have anything to do with it, but on the other side, there's something about her energetically that reminds me of Buica. I don't know why, but it's the energy. It's something about the power that she brings to what she does.
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Okay. For those that don't know, Buica, who is a lot of people's favorite, especially here at npr. She is a vocalist from Palma de Mallorca.
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Who.
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Man, she's got this deep flamenco voice. We had her on a tiny desk a number of years ago. She did this amazing record with Cuban pianist Chucho Valdez. It was a tribute to Chamele Vargas. So like her range, her musical landscape is wide. That's by way of saying who Buica was. So let's hear a little bit of her tiny desk from 2013. This is Concha Buica on the tiny desk. Espada. An amazing performance.
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There's just something about that vocal quality. I don't know, it's really reminiscent to me of. Of a lot of. There is like a power and a confidence to some of these young Spanish artists and. And it makes me think of this other band. I saw them, Felix, at Monkey Week, this kind of conference Festival in the south of Spain last November. And I just, like, they stayed with me. They have such this really interesting energy. They're called Repion, and I want to play you a little bit of this song, Barrio Somavilla.
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Saka.
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Sam.
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You know, Ana, you're touching on something that was always a highlight of my visit to the south by Southwest festival in Austin, because the Sounds of Spain presentation there was always a lot of really great rock bands.
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Absolutely. And the thing about Spain, Felix, specifically, and I think it's important to know, you know, where this sits in the context, because Spain, you know, under their dictatorship, they were not able to create certain types of art. They. They weren't able to sing publicly. I mean, that's still. You can see, like, culturally in Spain, people don't dance that much when they're out in certain ways in bars. And that has to do with. With this history. And so what happened is, once that ended, what you saw was this really incredible, you know, surge of punk and. And rock and all of these different things. And it still carries today, especially in the north. Do you remember, Felix, when we were up there in Bilbao and in all these places where we felt a lot of that, like, even in stores and cafes, we heard a lot of that music?
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Yeah, I do. And it reminded me of, again, how we've been doing this in alt Latino for a while. There was that record label in Spain that started reissuing a lot of the punk that came out right after the fall of the Franco dictatorship in 1975. There was a lot of reissues of stuff that's no longer available, but they had found it and they put it out. And, man, the energy, the rawness of that is just. It was overwhelming. And I could hear a lot of that in the rock that came after that.
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There's still so many other exciting artists like these girls, but they had a special energy to me, Felix, for sure.
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I think it's time for a break, Ana. Let's take a real quick break, and we'll be right back. More music from Spain to celebrate their triumph in the Mundias.
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day's top headlines, local stories from your community, your next podcast binge Listen. You can have it all in one place, your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Okay, we're back. We're listening to music from Spain. Ana, you brought the whole playlist this week.
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This was such an exciting opportunity for me, Felix. Really. I just, I listen to so much Spanish music and I get to just
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sit back and listen. So carry on.
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Okay, so now we're entering my most exciting, I think the most exciting thing for me, I am huge fan of the Spanish producers, but nothing gets me like some of these artists in this Barcelona indie kind of jazz scene. So we have to remember, first of all, we don't forget Barcelona. A lot of people talk about Madrid. It's kind of like the bigger space for music. But oh my God, the artists that come from Barcelona talking Rita Paez, Sylvia Perez Cruz, even Rosalia. Now the interesting thing to me, Felix, about Barcelona and the whole region of Catalunya is that it's not like Madrid, where everyone arrives from different parts of the country or even other places in the world and they make music there. I mean, there are those artists, but a lot of these artists are very local. Like they're actually local Catalunians. They're from generations and generations of the place. They make music and live where they grew up with their families, with their grandparents. And so you hear a lot more of that local exchange there. I would say it's something that some of these people have known each other for a lot of years. So the first song I wanted to play is off of the 2024 Lucia Fumero album. I specifically want to play her collaboration, yes, with Rita Paez. This song is called La Bamba.
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Anna. I was so knocked out when you brought in Lucia Fumero that I built a whole playlist around.
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That is the ultimate sign when Felix builds a whole playlist.
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Remember, she did the two albums Folklore Uno and Folklore Dos in 2024, because there was so much creativity to be contained on one record, man. And they flow flawlessly.
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And there is a difference. I think my point, you know, when I talk about this Barcelona seed, when you take a little bit of the business element of the music industry out of it, because that's really what we're actually talking about here. When you talk about people who have real relationships, the way that making music functions now with a lot of these young artists is you go for a session, maybe a label pairs you up, and you make something that's a completely different and honestly, less organic experience than, hey, we're all friends. We have a relationship. Let's create something together. Not necessarily as a band or a single project, but as people who just probably sat down, I bet. I mean, Lucia and Rita are super friends. They play together all the time. They sat down, and that probably came out of so many moments of just creating and making music for the sake of making music together. Which brings me to one of my most favorite duos in Barcelona ever. I don't know these two brothers, Maestro Espada, they make up this duo, and they actually work a lot with Guitarica de la Fuente, who, you know, I also love, who's also from this area. But, oh, my God, Felix, the way they make music together. There's something about being brothers, like we've talked about with Hermanos Gutierrez, that just does something special. I'm gonna play you one of my favorite songs, La Desper.
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Sak. Me.
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I'm pretty sure I hear an Indian tabla in those percussion breaks.
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That's what I've always wondered. What. What's in there? But it adds this quality that I. It's like in my skin. It's so beautiful, this song. And I think that that's something right about the brother dynamic, about creating something with people who mean something to you. There's just this certain type of soul that is really present, I think, in everything that they make. And. And that's my point with this scene, is that it's really organic. It's really authentic. It's pulling. Yes. From Spanish sounds. You know, technically, flamenco's not from this region. There are some artists that play with it, but really more just from a really sweet acoustic kind of beholden to no. 1 type of creation, which I find really exciting.
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I think that Ana, once you dig in and start looking and discovering and doing all that stuff once you dig in. Same with Brazil, what you're going through right now in Brazil, it's like there's so many, you have a knack of finding so many artists that completely blow me away. And you can follow this thread of these artists who just don't want to follow tradition, but use it, respect it, but then expand upon it. And that's what all of this music is this week. And the other thing I think maybe we have to talk about is you mentioned Rosalia in passing. Just this past weekend, I was having a conversation with this bass player in San Francisco who listens to all kinds of stuff and she's still blown away by Rosalia's album. And she had a chance to see her in California and we talked about how unpredictable it was and how in a way, even despite all the massive sales, like, she's still part of this tradition, I think. And she thinks of defying category, especially with Lux, and just creating something that's completely new. And that record just happened to get a lot of attention. But it's just the tip of the iceberg of all this other amazing music that you seem to find under every little corner everywhere you go. So carry on, young lady.
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Well, congratulations to Spain for winning the Mundial Viva Mexico. But congratulations to Spain and thank you for giving me excuse to talk about a lot of really exciting music.
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You have been listening to Aunt Latino. Our audio editor is Noah Caldwell.
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The executive producer of NPR Music is
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Soreya Mohammad, and Sonali Mehta is executive director of NPR Music. Drop us a line. Who have you been listening to from Spain? We'd love to know what you're listening to. Write to us@otLatinompr.org I'm Felix Contreras.
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And I'm Ana Maria Sayer.
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Thank you for listening.
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Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rivian, makers of the all electric three row R1S SUV and the always capable R1S pickup, designed with the planet and future generations in mind. Learn more or schedule a demo drive@rivian.com
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