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Songs We Love: Santiago Salazar, 'Mama Paz'

Santiago Salazar.
Courtesy of the artist
Santiago Salazar.

Santiago Salazar, <em>Chicanismo</em> (Love What You Feel)
/ Courtesy of the artist
/
Courtesy of the artist
Santiago Salazar, Chicanismo (Love What You Feel)

Few producers of classic techno and house in the U.S. have Santiago Salazar's pedigree, experience or breadth of perspective, yet remain so utterly under-recognized. Having begun his DJ career in East Los Angeles in the early '90s, Salazar decamped for Detroit in the early '00s to join what is essentially one of American techno's finest graduate schools: Underground Resistance, the Motor City collective founded by techno legends "Mad" Mike Banks, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, which counts a steady stream of top-line electronic music futurists among its "graduates" (many of them Latinos). Ever since Salazar's return to L.A., the music he's produced for a slew of small dance labels co-founded with likeminded musicians of Hispanic heritage — Ican with Esteban Adame, Historia y Violencia with Silent Servant — has been consciously bridging the gap between local Chicano culture and underground club sounds. Chicanismo, his long-overdue solo debut album, is simply an overt expression of this pairing.

The breakbeat techno of "Mama Paz," centered on a sample of a conguero's Afro-Cuban drum and voice, is among the album's most forward and ecstatic blends of classic Latin American rhythm and modern American techno kick. Of course it is: It's a song about Santiago's mother — written, Salazar writes, "in Southwest Detroit during a time I was missing my mother heavily. This song is dedicated to her." The track is actually a conversation between that sample, its looped drum-machine mirror, an insistent hi-hat and some phased keyboards; it's a dialogue between living musical traditions, and between generations. It's the kind of small-a anthem that can unite a diverse dance-floor, and the kind of music that both Salazar's mom and his musical elders in Detroit and Los Angeles can be proud to have fostered.

Chicanismo is out Sept. 7 on Love What You Feel.

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