Gotan Project

• Genre: Trip-Hop
• Hometown: Paris

About

In the techno age, setting tango to electronic beats should have been an obvious project --but it wasn't. It took a couple of French beatmakers, Philippe Cohen-Solal and Christoph Mueller, and a handful of Argentinean expats to finally make the connection in 2001. And what an excellent connection it was. The Gotan Project -- named after the Buenos Aires slang for tango -- have quite possibly rescued the genre from those twin ghettos of musical obscurity: classical and world music. The project takes trip-hop's trademark cool and tango's visceral excitement and makes them...well...dance together. The sound is hip and slightly tense, and that's its beauty. Singer Christina Vilallonga's voice is a thrilling, guttural instrument, and the marriage of electronics and live instrumentation is a testament to the skill of the musicians involved. Overused words like "seamless" and "organic" were made for this project. Gotan are not just for 21st century hipsters; we'd wager that any Buenos Aires resident circa 1930 would hear the band and simply get it.

- Sarah Bardeen