Tyler, the Creator is hard to classify. He’s a slippery dolphin, but you could say that the American rapper and producer makes sensorial, intense music that walks the edge of the most experimental rap. On one album, Kali Uchis can be heard as a guest and you can also hear a piano, a sound investigation based on jazz. He moves comfortably between the strange and the mainstream. Nothing seems to unite Tyler with the Argentine band with more than 20 years of experience that brings us together, but yes, the same attributes that can be used to describe him are in Poseidótica: a fantasy universe of his own, with a language in continuous development and a creative freedom that is driven by the ambition to create, each time, more personal music.
In addition to this parallelism, which may seem capricious, there is another reason that justifies it: “Tyler” is the name of the seventh song on Words and realityPoseidótica’s fifth studio album. How do you name the songs of an instrumental band, where there are no lyrics that anchor a message? In sensorial, sonic, even random references, in inside jokes that later, when formalized, are dressed with a meaning. “There was a part of the song that reminded us of him, but then Tyler ends up being a character on the album, in this whole fantasy that only we know,” says Cobra Rod, the band’s bassist.
In the artisanal engineering of making an album, Poseidótica are very careful with the details and their fans appreciate it. They apply their curatorship to a network of links with bands that are friends from the provinces and the region, which they help to play in Buenos Aires and then they get feedback with uninterrupted tours around the country; with the same care they plan thematic shows, like their Viaje de Agua festival, a space that did not exist for heavy, psychedelic or progressive bands that they created to take them to large concert halls, where these styles are not usually programmed. “We wanted to invite other bands and have them treated in an exemplary way, have a first-class backline so that they sound good, and have the same cachet for a band that is just starting out as for a group with a track record. That has value for us,” Cobra continues. The same criteria apply to the network of musicians they invited to play with them, to take their music beyond the limits of the genre, such as Litto Nebbia, Adrián Dárgelos (Babasónicos), Marina Fages, Edelmiro Molinari (Almendra/Color Humano), Paula Maffía, Nekro (Fun People/Boom Boom Kid), Carca or Lucy Patané.
Now for Words and reality Poseidótica brought their magnifying glass to the heart of the collector. On August 10, when the doors of the legendary Teatro Flores open for them, for the first time, their audience will be able to find the cassette released by Aquatalan Records –their own label–, but also the CD by Smolder Brains Records from Mexico, and next year the vinyl edition will arrive by Clostridium Records from Germany. It is not only the nostalgia of the formats where we learned to love music, to listen to it with greater fidelity or to transport it with us, it is the love for detail. In each physical disc, Poseidótica writes a fictional story that accompanies the concept of each record. It is for collectors, yes, so that they fall in love with the object in their hands, but it is also the fuel for the internal fire, the one that feeds the fantasy after 23 years together.
In this fifth album after Intraworld (2005), Distance (2008), Chronicles of the Future (2011) y The dilemma of origin (2015), Poseidotica made Tyler a protagonist of his fantastic journey to the meaning of life. In the booklet of the album, there is a monologue by this character who lives in the future and is between 543 and 544 years old: “Am I a hero of the counterculture? I don’t know for sure. They wanted to erase my identity, make me disappear, but they couldn’t –the story goes–. There were many beings in my same situation, a community that they couldn’t decimate or separate, hope remains intact.” Is Tyler perhaps saying that underground musicians, those over 40, are an endangered species? They may seem few, out of focus, but they are there resisting the blows of the fleeting, the transitory nature of the music industry.
In a café in Villa Crespo, Cobra Rod, the alias of Martín Rodríguez, one of the four members of Poseidótica –which he forms together with Walter Broide, Santiago Rua and the new guitarist Eugenio De Luca– says that in the end, everything they do is to continue having fun, to feel motivated as a band, as friends. “We don’t owe anything to anyone, we do this first for ourselves. It sounds a bit selfish, but I think that is the starting point for any musician.”
What they do is the effort to play in bigger and bigger places, to do increasingly complex shows, which require a much more precise execution. A machine put at the service of the imagination of a few? fans. And, for that reason, the material is important: “We are fighters against the ephemeral. We want there to be something concrete, something physical after composing, rehearsing, recording it for so long. We don’t want it to be uploaded to digital platforms and that’s it. When you have the CD, the vinyl or the cassette, you look at it, you grab it, it has a cover, it says the names of the songs, who recorded them, there are photos, a story, it materializes. We are not deniers of modernity, not at all, but if you have the option of all that coexisting, it’s great.”
In Words and reality, They did something crazy: they recorded all the songs in a studio and decided to have a different sound engineer do the mixing. They wanted to play, to experiment with a new sound –although controlled by the sound identity of the songs–. “Tyler”, for example, was mixed by Santiago De Simone from Bohemian Groove, Dillom’s engineer. There is also Maxi Leivas, Estanislao López, Paulina Chiarantano, Sebastián Barrionuevo and, among others, “Sur Realista” was done by Billy Anderson, an American engineer for countless heavy bands like Melvins, Mr. Bungle and from here Los Natas. The idea, very creative, was also a bit chaotic when the songs started to arrive. How do you go about giving feedback to each engineer about each instrument? “It was an odyssey, I wouldn’t do it again although we are happy with the result. Above all for having met so many national producers, who are at a very high level. The experience with them was better than with Anderson.” In a game with the title, Poseidotica builds her reality instead of speaking. In August, they will write a new chapter of their personal epic.
Poseidontic presents his album on Saturday 10th Words and realitywith Iah, Undermine and Wrrn as guest bands. At El Teatro Flores, Av. Rivadavia 7806. At 6 p.m.
