- "I feel one of my duties is to go back to the African part of tango, to reclaim the rhythm and to make it important and visible again." So goes the mission statement for the latest record on NON, a label intent on voicing the identities and experiences of the intercontinental African diaspora. San Benito takes us to Buenos Aires, where MORO is trying to tease out the African heritage of Argentine tango music. Or rather, he's trying to beat it back in: this is a merciless record that asserts its narrative through blunt force. A mongrel take on Argentinian music dubbed "ramba" by MORO himself, San Benito's five tracks of intense rhythmic workouts recall Lechuga Zafiro's mechanizations of Uruguayan candombe music. But where Zafiro's music celebrates an old tradition, MORO's is downright destructive.
The two central elements on San Benito are percussion and water. Opener "Libres" is waterlogged, with each thrashing drum sound making its own splash in the pool. It's a neat bit of sound design that pops up elsewhere on the EP, as more liquid effects, squawking crows ("Caretango") and snarling wolves ("Arrepientanse") lend it a wild, elemental edge. Those tendencies are mirrored in the drums, which are untamed and angry, thrashing at you from every direction.
As cataclysmic as San Benito can be, it avoids monotony. The violent "Caretango" recedes into the lovely "Valentina," where a processed string melody flutters à la Björk's Homogenic, while "Salve Sua Vida"—itself more spacious and grime-influenced—fixates on a delicate harp. This yin and yang takes MORO beyond the realm of club music and into something more thoughtful. It comes to a head on the closer, "San Benito Status... Killed In Action." What starts out sounding funereal, ends up chaotic (listen carefully and you can hear what sounds like the launch of rockets) and then calms down into the same trickling stream of water that opened San Benito.
Water is embedded in Argentinian history. Buenos Aires sits on the Rio De La Plata, once a key route in the slave trade that brought Africans and their music to the continent. The estuary is a vessel for traumatic memories as well as great renewal, a dichotomy that MORO recognizes, which defines San Benito from its concept to its arrangements. Listening to the EP may evoke Drexciya's water-based tale of African diaspora, where pregnant slaves were thrown off ships mid-Atlantic and gave birth to underwater babies, creating their own aquatic society. In MORO's world, water doesn’t provide solace so much as it does brutal power, embodied in the angry waves that lash the Buenos Aires coastline on San Benito’s cover artwork.
Tracklist01. Libres
02. Arrepientanse
03. Caretango/Valentina
04. Salve Sua Vida
05. San Benito Status...Killed In Action